William Boyd stays away from the Zeitgeist. He’s not interested in writing about current events. “In two or three years’ time, nobody will care and nobody will know what you’re talking about. It’s just looking for obsolescence.” Nor does he care for the literary fashion for sticking closely to your own experiences. “Your life has to be pretty damn interesting if you’re going to foist it on the reading public. Why not make it up?”
Making it up has worked rather well for Boyd, 70. He’s spent the past half century tossing out big, rich novels set mostly in the recent past. There are the century-spanning “biographies” that follow single characters through their whole lives: The New Confessions (1987), Sweet Caress (2015) and, of course, the 2002 Booker longlisted Any Human Heart. There are the African novels (his 1981 debut A Good Man in Africa, later a film starring Sean Connery; An Ice-Cream War, which was Booker shortlisted in 1982), the spy thrillers (Restless won the 2006 Costa prize), the screenplays and the short stories.
