“Life,” says Shakespeare’s Louis, in King John, “is as tedious as a twice-told tale/ Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.” William Boyd’s new novel, isn’t tedious as such – for most of its distended length The Romantic rattles along in high old melodramatic style – but, boy, does it feel twice-told. No, not just twice-told: thrice-, quadruple-told. The life story of a man who, Zelig-like, manages to be present (or at least loitering nearby) at some of the major events of 19th-century history and literature? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The Romantic is clearly Boyd’s homage to the 19th-century novel. but it’s an open question whether the 19th-century novel still needs homaging, two centuries and many prior homages later. Nonetheless, here we are, playing Spot the Reference. In the early pages there appears a depressing schoolroom out of Dickens. Boyd tells us of the schoolmaster, Dean Smythe, that “His fussy, busy manner disguised the brutal temper of a fierce disciplinarian.” Dickens’s Mr M’Choakumchild, Dean Smythe’s original in Hard Times (1854), was a fiercer caricature.
Later there is a retread of the famous scene in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), in which the protagonist misses, to ironic effect, the real action at the battle of Waterloo. Boyd’s protagonist, Cashel Greville Ross, wanders off from his regiment in search of a diarrhoea-afflicted friend and has a bloody, largely accidental scuffle with some French lancers. Meanwhile, offstage, Bonaparte’s army is rousted.
What will the battle be called, the wounded Ross asks his superior officer. “The Battle of ‘Waterloo,’ apparently,” is the answer. “I must say I prefer Nivelles, don’t you, Openshaw? The Battle of Nivelles… has more of a ring to it.”
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The Romantic stirs up sundry other memories of the 19th-century novel and restages most of them with the same breezy sitcom irony. It’s one of those big, readable, middlebrow novels that operates on the principle of “You can’t beat the old malarkey.”
Cashel Greville, later Cashel Greville Ross, born 1799, grows up on the Co Cork estate of Stillwell Court, thinking he’s an orphan and the ward of Elspeth, the governess. In short order, Cashel is brought to Oxford and discovers that his true parenthood has been kept from him (more 19th-century novel shenanigans). In a snit – he doesn’t really do deep feeling, which is the secret of his success – he joins the 99th Hampshire Regiment of Foot. Shortly afterwards: “Boney’s escaped from Elba. Stand by, lads – this war’s not over yet.”
Cue Waterloo; demobilisation with honours; a brief spell as an officer in the massacre-prone East India Company army in Ceylon; then on to Italy, where Cashel arrives in Pisa just in time to become pals with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron. “Byron in Pisa,” Cashel exclaims. “Who’d have thought?”
He is not a 19th-century person but a 21st-century person, affably and occasionally judgmentally consorting with some 19th-century cosplayers. Beyond this he is a cipher
Who indeed? A character who finds himself travelling through many different worlds can’t, of necessity, exhibit too much in the way of individuality. (This was the joke in Woody Allen’s Zelig; is it okay to cite a joke from a Woody Allen movie these days? Let’s just say: a joke is a joke, no matter who made it.) Cashel Greville Ross is less a character than a vehicle, from whose windows we can see, as we travel, some of the main attractions of 19th-century history. Napoleon! British Imperialism! The Romantic poets! The slave trade!
Modern views
Cashel has good modern views on all of these things (he is anti-slavery, and condemns his East India Company superior officer for committing an “atrocity” by slaughtering some Kandyan villagers). He is, in other words, not a 19th-century person but a 21st-century person, affably and occasionally judgmentally consorting with some 19th-century cosplayers. Beyond this he is a cipher.
The problem with The Romantic isn’t that it’s too emotional (read: sentimental). It’s that it gives you lots of second-hand spectacle and no fresh feeling
The prose is occasionally original and alert, as in the phrase “the lane gleamed with thin tainted puddles in its rutted surface”, where “tainted” is both rhythmically gorgeous and precisely unexpected. But more often, we’re looking at a serious case of prose-bloat. Cashel, as a child, dreams of education, which “might allow him a chance to move out of the never-ending poverty that the cottiers seemed destined to live in forever”. Never-ending and forever: hmm. Sentences are forever pausing to tell us that “Cashel thought” or “Cashel noticed”, as if novelists had not, even in the 19th century, devised more elegant methods of presenting the workings of perception and consciousness.
A romantic, properly speaking, is someone who believes that emotion should prevail over reason. But the problem with The Romantic isn’t that it’s too emotional (read: sentimental). It’s that it gives you lots of second-hand spectacle and no fresh feeling. Rather than a voyage of discovery, it’s a tour of familiar landmarks.
The familiar can be comforting. It can also be boring. The one thing it isn’t is romantic – with or without a capital R.
