Brilliant Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach

There is a slight feeling of fog in Brazzaville Beach, like a mischievously temperamental aperture on a stunning up-to-date camera. A fog that obstructs the deep emotional relationship between men and women, sex and the self that is dealt with so honestly in other works in Boyd’s oeuvre.

Certainly the structure of this book is less simplistic: there are two plot lines, a past and a present for the main character, which has the affect of making it feel like some grand twist or revelation will come at the end – something every reader loves but is not true to reality, not as candid as the real flow and pull of life.

Maybe it says a lot about what I am interested in in a book, but Brazzaville Beach is preoccupied with maths, the human application of maths, and chimpanzees – which I cannot decide to be an allegorical episode or simply a paramount experience for the protagonist Hope.

Either way, the simple revelations about life passed out so off-handed and naturally in other Boyd novels here seem forced and difficult. The life we are shown in this novel seems less examined, and less worth investing in.

Any revelations we do encounter stem from concerted ostentatious crescendos of action, not random ephemeral moments. Perhaps this is due to the way the form differs, particularly, from, say, Any Human Heart (you will now be wildly wondering why this is masquerading as a review of Brazzaville Beach I’m sure) – Boyd’s most famous, and (widely understood to be-) best novel.

In Any Human Heart, the diary format lets you get incredibly close to Logan, and having read Brazzaville Beach only a few weeks after finishing Any Human Heart, I still feel I could have got closer to protagonist Hope, that her mistrust of herself is more performative than the achingly real indecision of other Boyd characters. It feels more like going through the motions, than a real tremulous fear of the pitfalls of life.

That said, maybe that is the strength of his heroine: her stoic confidence in the face of all tribulation borders at times on a lack of self-knowledge. For me this leaves her feeling less human, an Aeneas when I was expecting a Dido.

Either way, I would definitely encourage you to read Brazzaville Beach, despite all my negativity. The standard of Boyd’s insights still surpasses much of what I’m sure many of you will be struggling through this year on your courses.

If anything you should read it just for the wealth of vicarious memories the next image of a chimpanzee will evince from you. And, at the end of the day, the final lines show us a return to Boyd, a return to the writer who feels so comfortable in Logan’s body in Any Human heart.

I am desperate just to quote the last line here as as general a truism one can ever find in a novel, but instead have hidden it away somewhere above (ha!). So read it and find out! (And then read Any Human Heart… too keen?)