Offshoots

Published 26 September 2005

Bamboo: non-fiction 1978-2004 William Boyd Hamish Hamilton, 650pp, £20 ISBN 0241143055

In The New Confessions, published in 1987, William Boyd wasted little time in giving his young hero a piece of his mind: "Make your own rut," he said (through a third party, naturally). "It's the only way." It is a typical Boyd moment: a mordant English parody of America's follow-your-dream ideology, delivered with few frills. It also happens to be good freewheeling advice: the kind of thing Robert Browning might have written to a young priest - spirited, adventurous, and with a bolt of iconoclasm thrown in. And while this kind of career pointer is not for everyone (only those with varied options can take their pick), it is a useful maxim for writers. "Go west"; "go forth"; "see the world": these are rangy slogans of the kind that inspires books.

Certainly, Boyd has taken them to heart. In a string of better-than-readable fictions, on the page and on screen, he has established himself as one of Britain's premier men of letters, but also one of its least well defined. Some novelists have been happy to plough that single rut and become its master; Boyd roams a wider world. His characters have jobs as well as private lives: they are architects, ecologists, film-makers, even loss adjusters. He is not a brand: there is no style or cast of mind, no pose we could call Boydean. He has merely written energetically and inventively about a larger-than-usual spread of concerns.

I say merely, but there is nothing mere about this. Boyd began with a couple of comedies set in Africa (he was born in Ghana, and had a feeling for the nuances of colonial life sharper than anyone since Graham Greene). Since then his novels have narrated adventures and misadventures in London and New York, Berlin and Hollywood, Lisbon, Manila, Scotland, France and Uruguay. If novelists enjoyed air miles, you'd find Boyd in the Club lounge.

All of which is to say that it is nice to have a book anchored in his own life. Bamboo is a collection of reviews and essays - the kind of thing that some novelists try, quaking with false modesty, to pooh-pooh as incidental jottings. Refreshingly, Boyd does the opposite, admitting that, having concealed himself well in his fictions (through the simple and conventional device of making things up), even he was surprised by the autobiographical accuracy of these pieces, and by their volume. To be sure, the book isn't called Bamboo because it's slender: the shoot has 600 leaves.

Many contain book reviews. Although these span the main fields in which Boyd has worked and lived - Africa, literature, cinema, painting, London, France - it is noticeable that his artistic consumption has tighter horizons than his own writing. He likes Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, William Golding and Muriel Spark; he likes Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Frank Auerbach; Oxford, Chelsea and the First World War. He writes engagingly about all of them, but this is an orthodox, even old-fashioned Eng Lit reading list. The volume seems somehow diffident: we'd love to know what he thinks of the giants - Kafka and Nabokov, Tolstoy and Proust. There's a leaflet on Dickens and a sprig on Flaubert, but Boyd has steered clear of big game.

He likes alphabetical lists: there's an A-Z of Anglo-France, an A-Z of Chekhov, an A-Z of Michael Andrews, and a half-alphabet ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Photograph"). These show him at his best - busy, quick, fertile - but also expose a tendency to reduce, to compress, perhaps to skim. As a result, the most beguiling entries are the autobiographies. Boyd's friendship with the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 for truth-telling, inspires an affecting trio of tributes. His fondness for France generates several evocative raptures. His travails in the screen trade allow him to graze in the no man's land between books and films, and his childhood furnishes him with breezy remembrances of boarding school.

Some of these are conventional: porridge, nicknames and glimpses up matron's skirt. But there are also sharp visions of duckboards and the astonishing Scottish sky. It is here that Boyd, a child of the tropics, first sees snow; his own Ghanaian tan is striking enough for his pale peers too call him "wog".

Time and again Boyd gives the stock response a twist. Most British cartoons have a laugh at French rudeness; Boyd celebrates the "quotidian politesse" that marks life in his adopted country, and laments its absence in Britain. All the same, his tribute to the egg-chips-and-beans British caff is fervent and serious; enough to make anyone feel peckish for soggy toast.

The most lacerating fragment, however, is a hair-raising chronicle of administrative misfortune. In 1985 Boyd's second book, An Ice-Cream War, was published in France and became a bestseller. He was 33; dreams of literary wealth were fading, but at last he had hit "pay dirt". He was charming on French television, and sales skipped past the 100,000 mark. But the French publisher was slow to cough up the proceeds, and a year later the money due was just under £60,000. This was a serious sum - enough to buy a several-bedroomed flat in Notting Hill, say. Months passed; still the money was withheld. In the end (to cut an entertaining story short), Boyd found himself tangled in an 11-year legal squabble. He won at law, but secured, after subtraction of fees, about a third of what he was owed.

It is a shameful affair that seems, happily, not to have ruined Boyd's life. It neither arrested the trajectory of his career nor dimmed his affection for France. In retrospect, it is merely - merely! - an anecdote. It might be that Boyd's reluctance to make a crisis out of such a drama is a flaw: he may lack the preening self-regard of the true great. But it is a very likeable flaw. I can't be the only reader to vow, if ever I meet a French publisher in a lift, to elbow him in the teeth.

Robert Winder is the author of Bloody Foreigners: the story of immigration to Britain (Abacus)

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