William Boyd is walking through one of those dark, underground car-parks that seem to go on for ever, an endless line of receding concrete pillars. He is going to meet his father. When they meet, he and his father will talk as equals, and his father will be happy that his son has become this very successful writer.
That's how the dream goes, anyhow. Boyd dreams about his late father two or three times a year. When it happens, Boyd knows he is asleep, but has the feeling he is able to control the dream. It's a sensation sleep researchers call "lucid dreaming", and it is one of the very few nice things that happens to Lorimer Black, the hero of Boyd's latest novel, Armadillo. "The consolation of dreams," as Boyd calls it in the book.
Boyd is the self-effacing one of the literary Brit pack: his is a calm personal-life with no publisher-hopping, but because he tells a good story it's a safe bet that more of his books are actually completed by readers than those of his fellow-authors who make literary headlines more often. Armadillo is Boyd's seventh novel and he commands advances round the £300,000 mark. Between books, he writes screenplays, with the kind of assurance that made him insist his name was taken off the film Diabolique, when his screenplay was rewritten. Boyd wrote his father into his first novel, A Good Man In Africa, as the doctor, Alex Murray, and he cherishes the hope that his father`s spirit got a kick out of his character being played by Sean Connery when the book was made into a film.
Boyd had only published a couple of short stories when his father died of a rare African disease, Q fever, which causes symptoms something like a slow stroke. So Boyd's father never saw his son's literary and popular success. In Armadillo, Lorimer Black spends his days hoping he will have lucid dreams about Flavia Malinverno, the woman he loves, so that he can feel what it's like to kiss her. Boyd's own lucid dreams are a chance to straighten out leftover business with his father.
"My father died with I was 25," Boyd says. "I look forward to these dream encounters with him because it's a curious form of virtual immortality. I'm the age I am now, so I'm 45 years old, in the dream, but he's the age he was when he died - 59. We meet in places I don't need Freud to help me understand: last time it was walking through an empty stadium, the time before that an underground car park.
"I didn't have a proper adult relationship with him," Boyd says. "I think . . . uh, how can I put this? It may sound arrogant, but it's something which happens . . . when you're cleverer than your parents, it's a problem. You say, I'm not going to have an argument because I know I'll win.
"We were two different personalities, my father and I, although both in our own way equally stubborn: every piece of advice he gave me I just quietly ignored. We had very different ideas about how I should lead my life. I was an impoverished student when he died and I think he was very dubious about what would become of me. In the lucid dream encounters, of course, he does see what's become of me.
"I don't think of my relationship with my father as unresolved," he adds. "I just recognise it as a bit of bad luck." Luck - good and bad - is one of Armadillo's themes. Lorimer Black, the main character, is literature's first fascinating loss-adjuster: the man who comes around when there's a big insurance claim to persuade the claimant to take a suitcase full of money rather than pursue the insurance company for the full insured amount. Insurance, says Boyd, is a human stab at trying to offset the vagaries of life. The loss-adjuster is the person who proves you can't because even if you take out really good insurance, who will protect you from the insurer?
It's a bleak perspective, though made comic in the novel. "Life is risky, fragile," Boyd says. "You never know what will happen next. We all try to arm ourselves against life's unpredictabilities and we do it in different ways - you know, mental toughness, or then there's insurance, the pension plan and BUPA, but in fact all this armour is a kind of pretence at control, the fond hope that because you're insured life won't treat you cruelly or unjustly or randomly."
In fact, to the observer Boyd's own life appears remarkably happy. He is both critically and commercially successful, and his private life is deeply fulfilling. He met his wife of 23 years, Susan, when they were both studying at Oxford. "That's my bit of wonderful good luck," he says. "At that stage of my life I met the person who is my platonic opposite and we are happy. You see friends' lives and their divorces, and you realise just how lucky that timing is."
Susan Boyd is a journalist; editor-at-large for the US edition of Marie- Claire, which is edited by Glenda Bailey. When Bailey moved to the States from Britain she wanted Susan to come with her. The Boyds didn't want to move, happy in their London home and their second home in France. So Susan Boyd works from London, travelling to the US six times a year. Her London day starts at about 4 p.m. when the phone-calls from the States begin; which synchronises perfectly with William, who says he tends to start writing in the afternoon, and manages about four or five hours before he's exhausted.
Boyd finished Armadillo in May, and "novel number eight is now brewing up". Until now, the titles of Boyd's novels have told you what the book is about: A Good Man In Africa, An Ice Cream War, Brazzaville Beach. Armadillo is a departure from that: it is William Boyd's first metaphorical title (though he admits that he did think of calling it The Lucid Dreams Of Lorimer Black at first. The Armadillo - which means, literally, small, armoured man - is the metaphor for the disguises people take on to shield themselves.
"I recognise instinctively an idea or moment or personality as being material for a novel," Boyd says. "I was writing a film about an insurance scam, and friends who work in the insurance business in London told me about these loss adjusters with their suitcases full of money; they're all ex-policemen or ex-soldiers and it was the combination of that brutal hard man inside the deeply respectable world of the city which intrigued me. I've now met people who've been loss-adjusted by these rather sinister types: the objective is to adjust the loss down."
Boyd, who grew up in Africa before being sent to boarding school in the UK, has written a novel about a loss-adjuster who sheds his past so thoroughly his mother doesn't like to trouble him to attend his father's funeral. The book is about how people disguise themselves to keep themselves from being known. Lorimer Black is really Milomre Blocj, descendant of gypsies, who is shedding his past as thoroughly as his brother is fleecing him for spare cash. (Boyd though, refers to his creation as Lorimer, not Milomre: "He was Lorimer first," Boyd tells me. "Then I filled in the Milomre part.")
Black is a chameleon, his dress code taking on the colours of whatever company he's keeping. Boyd, who hasn't done an interview for seven years, is obviously good at keeping himself low profile too. Although he has been using the same coffee shop (also frequented by Charlotte Rampling, who does get recognised) around the corner from his house in London's Chelsea for 10 years, the waitress looks blank when I go in to do this interview and say I'm meeting William Boyd. "Don't know him," she says. But the cafeteria's anonymity is about to be blown: in real life the Cafe Picasso, in the novel Boyd has used it, barely concealed, as the Cafe Matisse.
It is when Lorimer Black's father dies that the character begins his final shedding of disguises. His mourning is subdued, a very low key in the novel, lightly written in the mass of episodes and coincidences. He couldn't talk to his father, he never really knew him, but he can feel the sadness. Not resolved necessarily, but accepted - a different kind of loss-adjusting. Boyd is writing about a loss he recognises: it is the consolation of novel-writing.