Review: The Romantic, by William Boyd
Knopf, 2023. 451 pp. $30

Cashel Greville Ross, born in county Cork, Ireland, 1799, lives with his beloved aunt, who takes pains to make him a literate, observant person and tells him stories about his deceased parents. In particular, she opens to him the world of emotions, not always available to little boys—and mark ye, reader, for this will matter.

However, as a teenager, Cashel discovers that the family stories his aunt told him are untrue. In a fit of shame, fury, and adolescent pique, he runs away and enlists in the army as a drummer boy under his middle name, Greville.

The reader knows more than Cashel does; the boy has much to learn. But a lesser figure might have crumpled under the weight of hasty decisions, and that’s not our hero. I don’t want to give too much away, because one thing that marks The Romantic is its narrative surprises. Yet simple arithmetic suggests a date with destiny: a soldier born in 1799 will turn sixteen in 1815, a watershed year in British history.

Even so, he becomes, among other things (not in this order), a farmer, author, lover, government official, and explorer. He travels or works or both on almost every continent and nearly signs on to further adventures in the ones he missed. Throughout, he follows his impulses, which can (as with his adolescent fit of pique) lead him astray. His keen sense of pride and inability to forget an insult or wrong place him in difficult circumstances, sometimes even in harm’s way. But the lad from county Cork bobs up like one, managing to remake himself once more.

Cashel’s blessed, in other words. He leads a fascinating life, full of vivid experiences others may only dream up, and he turns downfall into the vehicle of recovery. A phoenix, if you will. Among The Romantic’s charms is how he turns bad luck into good.

Boyd subtitles his picaresque tale The Real Life of Cashel Greville Ross, and a brief note before the first chapter pretends that the author has worked from Ross’s private papers. It’s a common enough literary conceit, but what Boyd does with it differs. More than a few novels place a fictional wanderer among the famous—Jamie MacGillivray is a recent example in these pages; Billy Gashade fits the format more exactly—but Boyd tweaks the usual script.

Cashel’s life changes dramatically because he’s rubbed shoulders with the great and—to his surprise—often finds that dropping those well-known names opens doors. He becomes “the man who knew/did _____,” which creates unexpected opportunity.

But what stirs Cashel the most is love, as with this passage about the woman he instinctively senses will be the most important in his life:

He saw her standing with her back to the wall, close to a sconce with three candles burning that cast a warm, shifting light on her hair, burnishing its auburn into a kind of deep glossy chestnut. On seeing her, he felt the authentic body-disturbance of lungs and viscera, the attendant lightness of head, the genital tightening and quiver of acute sensual recognition. He had never been so convinced of the rightness of a course of action in his life.

As this passage suggests, Boyd explores the essence of attraction, physical and otherwise (see also: Love Is Blind), and he devotes his considerable gift for prose in leisurely but always focused storytelling. The Romantic is about a nineteenth-century man and at times reads like a nineteenth-century novel.

But it’s not Victorian—not in the writing, anyway. I see no Dickensian style here, except for the reliance on coincidence, nor does the approach remind me of Flaubert or other Continental contemporaries. The story and themes do evoke Stendhal, of whom Boyd drops a reference, but you’ll never mistake The Romantic for an attempt to imitate writers from 175 years ago. Rather, the novel provides a portrait of an age, or parts of one.

There’s skullduggery among men of business, poets and their passions, the rise of manufacturing, the love for antiquity (which sometimes occasions the skullduggery and poetic passion), and the urge to discover and become famous for it. All these changes and preoccupations mark the era, and as Cashel observes them or picks them up and handles them, he delights or is repelled or profits.

The Romantic isn’t for readers who have a train to catch. But if you can take your time, savor, and participate in a ramble or two, you’ll be highly rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.