Rating: 3/5
Review:
A bit bored by Boyd
I enjoyed parts of
Love Is Blind, but I found a good deal of it dull and I’m not sure
that it added up to much in the end.
The book follows
Brodie Moncur from his early working life in the late 19th
Century as a talented piano-tuner in Edinburgh as his work and his
health needs take him to various places in France, Russia and beyond.
He develops an obsessive love for a Russian singer and this is both
the driver of the book’s events and the main subject of William
Boyd’s interest.
For the first third
or so of the book I was carried along by Boyd’s easy prose and the
interest which, slightly surprisingly, I found in the details of
Brodie technical work on pianos. The trouble is, I wasn’t very
convinced by Brodie’s passion and found that I was more interested
in his piano-tuning than the state of his heart. I got no real sense
of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some
fairly graphic descriptions. This is not a good combination in a
tale of overmastering passion and as the story moved from place to
place I kept thinking, "OK, you're somewhere else now and
you're still in love with her. And…?” I wasn’t drawn in by
the period setting, either. The language isn’t always convincing
and there are some rather clunky references to contemporary events
and so on.
Things picked up a
little in the later part of the book with some more dramatic
developments and sense of threat, but it still wasn’t all that
involving. It wasn’t helped by a somewhat melodramatic feel and in
the end I was quite glad to finish the book, whose emotional climax
didn’t affect me in the slightest, I’m afraid, because it felt
contrived and overdone. Love Is Blind is by no means terrible, but
it certainly isn’t one of Boyd’s best and I can only give it a
very lukewarm recommendation.
(My thanks to
Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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