Love is Blind

What was it about this woman?

Just finished reading William Boyd’s wonderful novel Love is Blind, the story of Brodie Moncur, piano tuner and romantic idealist, who escapes the repressive strictures of his tyrannical clergyman father in his home town of Edinburgh and finds himself on a journey of discovery that spans Paris, Nice, Vienna, St Petersburg and the Andaman Islands.

This new world is wonder enough for the naïve young Scotsman, but nothing has prepared him for what happens when he meets the beautiful Russian soprano, Luka Blum, (she calls herself Lika). The novel is subtitled: The Rapture of Brodie Moncur, and Boyd captures the all-consuming feelings that run through Brodie’s mind from the moment he sets eyes on Luka, through the early, clumsy encounters to the eventual physical consummation of love.

Here are some pivotal moments that track the romance between Brodie and Luka:

‘Brodie felt now as if his innards were molten – as if he might melt in a puddle of sizzling magma on the floor. What is it about this woman? How could a tall, Russian, mediocre opera singer be having this effect on him?’

‘It was a measure of the disturbance going on inside him – he had indigestion only, the champagne burning – this was the effect of being alone with Luka Blum.’

‘Was it the lips or was it the eyes? Or was it some more subtle equation of the face? The distance between eyes equalling the distance between nose and top lip? Or the precise setting of the lips between nose and chin… How did such fascination occur? One saw a thousand women’s faces in a month, say. Why was your eye – your heart, your loins – enthralled by just one?’

‘He imagined her naked. He imagined himself in bed with Lika, naked, entering her, staring down at that face surrounded by its unruly blonde hair. Those lips. Those hooded, sleepy eyes. He reached down and touched himself . Gripped himself. He looked at the ceiling then closed his eyes and thought of Lika.’

‘Brodie decided to walk home after his three hours in bed with Lika Blum. Dusk gathering as he walked along the boulevard Saint-Germain and turned to cross the Seine on the Pont de Sully. He walked like an automaton, a slight smile on his face, bemused, exultant, astonished at what had come to pass.’

Later in the story, Luka confronts Brodie in an encounter where she offers that his vision of her is deluded:

‘Look at your love for me. It’s blind. You don’t see me as I really am. All the many nuances of Lika Blum. The light and the dark. You just see the light. You just see what you want to see.’

If Brodie Moncur is truly unable to see Lika with anything other than through the romantically skewed lens of a lover’s eyes, let’s call it cupid-vision, he is offered some latitude for forgiveness when his eyesight is discussed later in the book.

‘Ah. You’re the Scotsman. They told me they had a Scottish piano tuner here.’ He looked at Brodie’s spectacles. ‘Are they efficient?’

‘Excellent, I’d be blind without them.’

‘Me too… Yes.’ He paused. ‘Blind as a worm. Is that what you say in English?’

‘Blind as a bat.’

Maybe Brodie’s comment there is all too prescient, he knows he is fully aware that he is blind, in more ways than one. The blindness of love, though, is not one that he, nor anyone, has any capacity to resist.

William Boyd, in the preface of the novel, quotes Robert Louis Stevenson:

‘Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause.’

Hold the emails, I have some reading to do.

Decisions, decisions.

As the working year comes to a close, I’ve got a stash of books saved for the occasion. Not sure which one I’ll choose first. Here follows a brief summary of the seven distractions vying for my attention – a dazzling predicament indeed.

Love is BlindWilliam Boyd

A young Scottish writer, Brodie Moncur, finds himself in Paris. There’s a love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano. The blurb promises ‘a sweeping tale of love, revenge and music.’ I very much look forward to another book by William Boyd, having recently finished Sweet Caress and recalling a favourite from back in 2002, the wonderful Any Human Heart, a journey through the twentieth century.

The OverstoryRichard Powers

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this was the novel heavily backed to win – pipped at the post by Anna Burns’ Milkman. Nine Americans, their stories interwoven in a multi-narrative ecosystem, are brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. A paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees. The Overstory explores the essential conflict on this planet: the one between humans and the natural world. This then is an epic novel making a last stand to save our planet. A timely read, then?

The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story Philip Hensher

A collection of short fiction from the last twenty years. V.S. Pritchett, Irvine Welsh, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and more. Philip Hensher, editor, describes the collection thus: ‘…both raucous and withdrawn, preposterous and precise, hilarious and sumptuous in sentiment, vulgar or correct to the last degree. It was hard not to conclude that British writing is addicted to the extremes.’ This is a book one can dip in and out of between longer format stories. Like a kind of literary sorbet between dishes.

In the Garden of the Fugitives Ceridwen Dovey

Hard not to be seduced, initially, by the beautiful cover – the floral arrangement woven delicately among the typography. ‘A novel of obsession, guilt, and the power of the past to possess the present.’ It’s a story of a revived friendship. Royce, one time benefactor to Vita, contacts her after a gap of some twenty years. The intervening years are shared via parallel narratives that travel through Boston, South Africa, Australia and Pompeii.

November Road Lou Berney

‘A great read, combining brutal action with a moving love story; gorgeous writing, too.’ So says one of the masters of crime writing, Ian Rankin. The assassination of JFK is the backdrop for this crime novel. Frank Guidry, mobster, knows too much about the president’s death, and, meanwhile, dead bodies are turning up around him. He’s worried he might be next and hits the road. We follow him as he travels across 1960’s America with his hunters hot on his trail.

Less Andrew Sean Greer

Winner of the 2108 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which puts him in the company of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A failed novelist, Arthur Less, is about to turn fifty when he receives an invitation to the wedding of his former lover. He contrives a way to avoid the wedding by instead accepting invitations to a string of literary events around the globe. Hilarious. Playful. Sly. Observant. And a quote from the book: ‘Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.’

Snap Belinda Bauer

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Belinda Baur is twice winner of Crime Novelist of the Year. This is the story of a teenage boy’s hunt for the killer of his pregnant mother. Crime-genre novels don’t tend to be considered for the Man Booker. The judges justified its inclusion, describing it as ‘an acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma.’ Elsewhere, I heard it described as ‘dark, atmospheric and bleak…the darkest of fairytales.’

In Search of Ryan’s Daughter

Tralee Golf Club, designed by the late, great, Arnold Palmer, is situated in County Kerry on the west cost of Ireland.

It’s a most spectacular stretch of links golf, the verdant dunes meeting the Atlantic coastline along a fringed stretch of eternally wide open white beaches.

Walking the course for the first time a few months ago, I sensed an urgent familiarity calling to me: I’ve been here before, surely?

Then the penny dropped: this stunning coastal landscape was the backdrop to one of my top ten favourite films: David Lean’s 1970 classic, Ryan’s Daughter.

I had to stop and take a breath.

On these shores, the languorous, quietly spoken school teacher, Robert Mitchum, and his young bride, the tragically naïve Sarah Miles had strolled along as Rosy Ryan (Sarah’s character) came to terms with the constrictions of her too hastily conceived marriage.

Ryan’s Daughter is a complex film that traverses a broad landscape: love story, political struggle, betrayal, rite of passage – it explores the innocence of a small town affair measured against the judgemental lens of a cynical world with historically entrenched attitudes.

Poor Sarah Miles, the eponymous Ryan’s Daughter, didn’t stand a chance. Fate had her doomed from the moment she set eyes on the broken shell of a man, the PTSD affected English soldier, Captain Randolph Doryan.