Trio by William Boyd: what a disappointment

One of our best-loved writers fails to engage with this scrappy novel, says Claire Allfree 

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Claire Allfree1 October 2020

William Boyd is in an enviable position as a novelist: a literary household name whose books even people who don't read very much tend to have read (albeit usually Any Human Heart, his best). He's rightly credited with combining rollicking story lines with subtly probing examinations of art, fate and the vagaries of love and when he is good he is very very good. Alas, when he is bad, he's downright dispiriting.

Trio falls into the latter category. It interweaves the lives of three characters connected to the making of a terrible-sounding film in Brighton over a few short months in 1968.

There's Talbot Kydd, the film's affable, late middle-aged producer and seemingly contentedly closeted homosexual whose job mainly involves steering the film through one crisis to the next; his jittery cliché of a lead actress Anny Viklund, who survives on pills to calm her down and more to wake her up; and Elfrida Wing, married to the director and a once famous novelist who now drifts about in an alcoholic daze, disguising her vodka in bottles of Sarsons White Vinegar. Of the three, she yields the reader the most satisfaction, her lunchtime nips to the local and her excited, booze-saturated delusions regarding her yet-to-be-written new book about Virginia Woolf lovely little sketches of deft comic pathos.

But what a scrappy, unsatisfactory, un-atmospheric novel this is. There's a notional interest in the extent to which you can ever know another person, notably through Kydd who, unbeknown to his wife, has a secret bolthole in Primrose Hill where he likes to snap male and female models, and a vaguely philosophical concern with individual agency, yet such tensions generate little by way of emotional jeopardy.

Boyd is known for his immersive approach to history yet beyond the occasional reference to Vietnam, riots in Paris and the times they are a changing, you'd barely realise Trio is set in 1968, or even on a film set, come to that. Moreover, his knack for conjuring an engaging yarn seems to have deserted him. Much of the book, as the filming rumbles on, is padding – endless needless descriptions and she said this and then he did thats; long winded encounters with people who have scant bearing on the story; narrative detours that go nowhere.

There is one major plot line – concerning Anny's ex husband Cornell, an anarchist and convicted terrorist who has absconded from prison after blowing up a federal building, prompting interest from the CIA – but it's so outlandish, and has such a top-heavy outcome, it defies credibility.

Boyd is not a master stylist, but he's painfully clumsy here, combining thunking expositions with dialogue of the 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' variety. In short, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that in writing this novel, his heart simply wasn't in it. Still, I was intrigued by Elfrida who, in her sly thought processes and obsessive identification with Woolf, gleams with narrative potential. Rescue her from this mess of a book and you might have a decent short story.

Trio by William Boyd (Viking, £18.99), buy it here.