Introduction: Of course, Boyd has form in blurring the worlds of reportage, history and fiction to great effect. In 1987, he published The New Confessions, a fictional autobiography, covering the first 75 years of the 20th century and notionally “written” by its subject, a maverick film director called John James Todd. Similarly, he invented the “real” artist Nat Tate as part of an April fools’ joke.
Développement: This is the kind of structural accomplishment that would defeat a lesser writer. But Boyd is a brilliant novelist, whose work has encompassed short stories, plays, screenwriting, thrillers and a James Bond adventure. At the forefront of all he does is the need to engross. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he tells a rollicking good story with the minimum of pretension.
