Trio
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4.1 • 13 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
***William Boyd's new novel, The Romantic, is available to pre-order now***
'An elating read' Sunday Times
A producer. A novelist. An actress.
It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There are riots in Paris and the Vietnam War is out of control. While the world is reeling our three characters are involved in making a Swingin' Sixties movie in sunny Brighton.
All are leading secret lives. Elfrida is drowning her writer's block in vodka; Talbot, coping with the daily dysfunction of making a film, is hiding something in a secret apartment; and the glamorous Anny is wondering why the CIA is suddenly so interested in her.
But the show must go on and, as it does, the trio's private worlds begin to take over their public ones. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will.
From one of Britain's best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel that asks the vital questions: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't?
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PRAISE FOR WILLIAM BOYD
'The ultimate in immersive fiction . . . magnificent' Sunday Times
'A finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination' Guardian on Love is Blind
'William Boyd has probably written more classic books than any of his contemporaries' Daily Telegraph
'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lives of a film producer, an actor, and a novelist converge during an ill-fated movie shoot in Boyd's madcap 16th novel (after Love Is Blind). It is 1968 and the very British Talbot Kydd is in Brighton overseeing the production. His leading lady is American ingenue Anny Viklund, and the movie is directed by the pretentious, unfaithful husband of famous writer Elfrida Wing. Talbot, secretly gay, constantly puts out fires on and off the movie set. Anny has been extorted by her terrorist ex-husband who has recently escaped from prison. And Elfrida is a raging alcoholic who can't get past the first, terrible, paragraph of her new book. As Boyd expertly unfolds his characters' stories, philosophical questions emerge: where does each of these individuals belong in history, and must they play the part expected of them? Filled with outlandish and amusing characters, including predatory talent agents and a pornography-peddling has-been actor, Boyd's novel offers its heroes paths to escape their burdens, some of which are a bit implausible, but all are fun to watch. Boyd is an exquisite stylist, and his tragicomic novel is a sublime escape.
Customer Reviews
Not his best work
3.5 stars
Author
Scottish novelist, short short writer, screenwriter. Born in Accra, Ghana, into a family of diplomats. His early, and best known, work is set in postcolonial Africa: A Good Man In Africa (1981), An Ice Cream War (1982), Brazzaville Beach (1991). He has won a Whitbread, a Somerset Maugham award, a John Rhys Llewellyn prize, a Costa novel of the year award, and been short listed for the Booker twice. Ian Fleming's estate commissioned him to write a Bond novel, Solo (2013), after he used Mr Fleming as a character in Any Human Heart (2002).
Precis
It's Summer 1968 and the eponymous trio are involved, directly or indirectly, in the making of a movie in Brighton, England. Anny is a twenty-something American actress "discovered" and launched to stardom by an auteur several years earlier. She has escapes a brief marriage to a US antiwar and everything else protestor turned domestic terrorist, but he's just escaped from prison and needs her help, read, money. Elfrida Wing is a novelist who made a splash with her first three efforts and was hailed as "the new Virginia Woolf." Unfortunately, she's now had a ten year dry spell creatively, although definitely not when it comes to alcoholic beverages. She's married to the movie's director, a serial philanderer who is his own greatest fan. Then we have Talbot Kydd, the producer, a WW2 veteran who inherited the family business and is now in partnership with, and in the process of being ripped off by, a fat Eastern European fellow of uncertain provenance, and still living the double life of the closeted homosexual (wife, kids, that sort of thing) even though the law decriminalising "lewd acts" has just passed, meaning at least he's not at risk of the Alan Turing treatment. Stuff happens, not just the assassinations of Dr King and Bobby, the Paris riots and those at the DNC in Chicago.
Writing
Mr B is a fine writer of British character driven fiction, with a touch of wry humour. Trouble is, I never felt engaged with any of the characters here. I also thought the style and humour teetered on the brink of a Carry On film at times. The momentous events happening in the rest of the world felt like a painted backdrop in a community theatre production.
Bottom line
A professional job in all respects, if not this author's finest work.