Any Human Heart [Paperback]

I certainly didn't want "Any Human Heart" to end. In fact I was trembling when I read Logan Mountstuart's final diary entry. Now I am mourning the passing of a man I could not possibly have known, existing as he did only in the minds of the author and myself in the two days I have done little else but read this book.

On the face of it, "Any Human Heart" has little to recommend it. It has no plot, a character with more flaws than qualities and seemingly no message to impart.

But Boyd's book is about a life. A life that is very different from yours or mine, in as much as mine is different from yours and ours are different from anyone else's. All our lives are plotless and for the most part very ordinary. Most of us have qualities that pale into insignificance when measured alongside our faults. Logan Mountstuart enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame which - despite Andy Warhol's assertions to the contrary - we don't all experience. "Every dog has his day" is probably closer to the mark.

But in reading "Any Human Heart" we get a rare insight into someone else's life - Logan Mountstuart's - from the minutiae of what he ate for lunch to the experiences that rocked his world and changed him for better or worse. Remarkably, it didn't matter to me that Logan Mountstuart was an entirely fictional character. I suppose this is because all our lives are fictions to those who don't live them.

The title confused me at first, but now I understand. We all have our stories to tell and even the most superficially "ordinary" life is extraordinary to someone else. Just consider the popularity of television's "Big Brother" to realise how fascinating we find other people's experiences - presumably because we find our own so dull. But that is not to say that others will.

We all have our ups and downs, our foibles and our virtues and experiences that make or break us. Most of our stories go untold, but Logan Mountstuart's did not. But swap his experiences for your own and this really could have been "any human heart".

Nothing I have read for years has had such a profound effect on me as this has. I don't think I could ever read it again - lives after all are only lived once. But I shall certainly be seeking out more of Mr Boyd's books.

Through his personal journals, begun in 1923, when he is seventeen, and continuing to the time of his death in 1991, we come to know Mountstuart intimately, both as an individual, growing and changing, and as an Everyman, someone who participates in and is affected by the seminal events of the 20th century, after World War I. Because he is a writer, he is able to travel and to know other writers and artists of the period. When he meets Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming, the reader has the vicarious fun of being there and meeting them, too, since Mountstuart, as a person, appears to be very much like the rest of us. He buys early paintings by Paul Klee and Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso draws a quick portrait of him and signs it. He engages in intellectual discussions about Braque, Picasso, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Bloomsbury group and keeps the reader aware of literary and artistic achievements of the era.

It is in his depiction of the historical moment that Boyd shines. By describing events through Mountstuart's experience, he is able to give a human face to people and circumstances which have influenced our history, and his choice of small details, often unique, offers a new slant on some familiar events. Boyd is particularly good at showing simultaneous events--Franco at the gates of Barcelona while Hitler is entering Prague--and his explanation of Neville Chamberlain's giving up of the Sudetenland resonates as an honest and even logical attempt to avoid the desperation of war. When Ian Fleming, who works for the Secret Service, gets Mountstuart a job in Naval Intelligence, the reader is introduced to the colorful world of the Duke of Windsor, as Mountstuart "spies" on him to make sure that the Duke's German sympathies do not make him a pawn of the enemy. Post-war, Mountstuart continues to be involved with the world of artists and writers--and world events--eventually living in Nigeria before retiring to France.

For the reader the book is a fast read, despite its length, filled with personal stories and colored by world events. Mountstuart's belief that life is just the aggregate of one's good luck and bad luck--that things simply happen--leads, of necessity, to a story which is not organized by a hidden, underlying theme. Befitting its philosophy, it is episodic and random, using the passage of time as its primary framework. Mountstuart himself accepts what happens to him, though it often saddens him, and does not agonize over what he might have done differently--he does not believe that he could have changed things. In that regard he remains one-dimensional, in many ways an Everyman for the history of the times. Fun to read, the book offers a new "take" on events which have shaped our own times, offering no lessons for the future, other than to live life, despite its ups and downs. As Mountstuart himself points out, life ultimately is a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." Mary Whipple