The Romantic

March 1, 2023

As soldier, farmer, felon, and writer, County Cork-born adventurer Cashel Greville Ross travels across multiple continents during the 1800s, moving from Massachusetts to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to Pisa, Italy, ever haunted by his one true love. From the Booker Prize short-listed Boyd, following Trio. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from June 19, 2023
Cast as a true story “discovered” by Boyd (Any Human Heart), this raucous picaresque chronicles an Englishman’s search for fulfilment and his encounters with prominent historical figures. Cashel Greville Ross is raised by an aunt, his parents having drowned shortly after his birth in 1799. He joins the British army as a young man, serves as a drummer at Waterloo, and travels the globe in search of his fortune. In Pisa, he meets Mary Shelley, who introduces him to her poet husband, Percy, and the couple’s good friend Lord Byron. In Africa, he races Richard Francis Burton and John Speke to locate the headwaters of the Nile. After he’s almost court-martialed for disobeying orders in Ceylon, Cashel does a stint in debtor’s prison in England, founds a brewery in America, and becomes an accidental smuggler of Greek antiquities in Trieste. He also falls in love with numerous beautiful women, among them a countess in Ravenna and a free-spirited Bostonian. Whether in describing military life on the far-flung frontiers of the British empire, detailing the financial perils of 19th-century publishing, or backgrounding Cashel’s adventure as Nicaraguan consul to Trieste, this inventively charts the highs and lows of a life extravagantly lived. Once again, Boyd holds the reader spellbound.

August 1, 2023
The latest novel from a startlingly consistent stalwart of British fiction is a "whole life" novel. Cashel Greville Ross' outlandish existence, which Boyd playfully suggests is true in a foreword and in notes strewn throughout, quickly moves from his childhood in Ireland to his teens in a plush English house. After familial drama leads Cashel to join the army, throughout his itinerant adult life he repeatedly has tangential roles in major events or encounters with famous historical figures. For instance, he serves at the battle of Waterloo, meets Byron and Shelley, and briefly crosses Stendhal's path (whose The Charterhouse of Parma is a clear model for this novel). Cashel's life reflects the fledgling world of consumer capitalism across the long nineteenth century, during which rapid technological advancements, such as trains and gas lighting, shrank the world and extended the day. While the authorial intrusions feel tacked on, this is a fine novel, and it is a pleasure to be immersed in Boyd's wry prose. As over-the-top as Cashel's life is, his failings and romantic ideals render him compellingly and endearingly human.

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Starred review from June 15, 2023
This appealing picaresque follows its hero's escapades for most of the 19th century. As a boy in Ireland, Cashel Greville Ross wonders one day why his aunt is disheveled just after he has seen a man leaving through the back gate. In his teens he'll discover his true parentage and leave home in anger. For his 17th novel, Boyd turns again to the sort of narrative he fashioned in The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002), and other works, a cradle-to-grave tale touched by historical events and figures. In a prefatory author's note, someone signed as W.B. says he came by the manuscript of Ross' unfinished autobiography and decided to make it whole via fiction. Surveying the text and a few objects that accompany it--such as a musket ball and an amphora shard--W.B. marvels that what's left when we die "can amount to virtually nothing." It's a sobering summation for the lively chronicle that follows. At 15, Ross joins the British army and soon finds himself at the Battle of Waterloo and on the receiving end of a French lance. In Italy, he hangs with Lord Byron and the Shelleys and has a haunting affair with a married contessa. He writes a bestseller in England but is cheated by his publisher and languishes for two years in debtors prison. He brews beer and starts a family in Massachusetts, seeks the source of the Nile, serves as Nicaragua's consul in Trieste, and gets mistaken for Ivan Turgenev in Baden-Baden. His fortunes seesaw giddily, rocked by poor choices and bad luck. It's an amusingly implausible life, and Ross, prey to drink, laudanum, strong passions, and the author's massaging of history, is an always-engaging character. While W.B. may question the heft of Ross' legacy, Boyd continues to enrich his own. A smart, colorful entertainment.

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