Love Is Blind by William Boyd

Love Is Blind by William Boyd is a real page turner. But the reader’s interest is never generated by cheap melodrama concerning threatened turns in an essentially linear plot. On the contrary, many a reader might finish this book and muse on exactly what the plot might have been. The revelation is that, as with most novels by William Boyd, it is the credible and unique lives of the characters that have provided both the interest and the stimulus to know more.

These characters are not what might be encountered in most novels of the page-turner variety. Brodie Moncur is a Scottish piano tuner who is employed by the quality makers Channon in Edinburgh. Brodie develops some neat tweaks that enhance the sound and playability of the machines placed under his care. He also has some ideas about how Channon might become a little more than a Scottish name. A period in the company’s emergent Paris office might help.

Brodie’s great idea is to sponsor a concert performer who will thus advertise the brand. An Irishman called Kilbarron accepts Brodie’s offer and all seems to be going very well indeed. And all does go very well, especially in relation to Brodie’s relationship with Kilbarron’s partner, a Russian soprano called Lika Blum.

A novel like Love Is Blind is simply about people. To describe their lives is to spoil the book’s currency. Suffice it to say that there are complications of many kinds along the way. Neither true love nor commerce nor music runs along a smooth path for these characters. Central to the book’s success is the credibility of Brodie’s commitment to his relationship with Lika, however, and it is this that binds everything together.

Brodie’s relations with his family are strained by a father who wants to disown him, and his relations with the Channon company also hit hard times for unexpected reasons. He moves across Europe in search of somewhere both safe and convenient to ply his trade and pursue his interest in Lika. In an unlikely turn of fate, he eventually finds his way to India to work alongside an American anthropologist. But then the detail is the plot, and we learn about his journey to India at the very start of the book, before in fact we have even met to protagonist himself.

But what is so engaging about William Boyd’s characters is their total credibility, no matter how unpredictable the events themselves become. By the end of the book, we feel we really have shared their experience and indeed lived through it with them.