William Boyd’s new novel is a moreish romp

Love is Blind. By William Boyd. Knopf; 384 pages; $26.95. Viking; £18.99

IN AN illustrious career spanning 20 works of fiction, William Boyd has covered a broad range of genres and tones. Early books such as “A Good Man in Africa” and “An Ice-Cream War” seemed inspired by Evelyn Waugh; later works such as “Brazzaville Beach” and “Armadillo” deal with weighty contemporary themes. “Restless” and “Waiting for Sunrise” are espionage thrillers. Some of his best-loved novels, such as “Any Human Heart”, are globe-trotting historical yarns. His moreish new one, “Love is Blind”, belongs in this last group.

Brodie Moncur is a Scottish piano-tuner—a profession Mr Boyd expertly evokes—and the son of a loathsome fire-and-brimstone preacher. The 19th century is drawing to a close. Moncur longs to escape the suffocation of the manse, and accepts an offer from Ainsley Channon, boss of the Edinburgh piano manufacturer for which he works, to move to its Paris showroom. There Moncur enterprisingly arranges for the firm to sponsor John Kilbarron, “the Irish Liszt”, who in return plays Channon pianos at his concerts.

Kilbarron lives with his brother, the sinister Malachi, and a Russian opera singer, Lika Blum, with whom Moncur falls violently in love. The two begin an affair, Moncur ensuring that he becomes indispensable to the ailing and volatile pianist. Love may be blind, but it is certainly benighted, constantly threatened with discovery, by the lowering presence of Malachi and, most troublingly of all, by Moncur’s tubercular lungs.

The second half of the book is a kind of cat-and-mouse game, which ends, as a number of Mr Boyd’s narratives do, on a remote island, on which its amiably flawed protagonist washes up. As much as the finely orchestrated plot, the joy of the story lies in its perfect period detail, the exquisitely sketched settings and a cast of supporting characters who, as in the best novels of the era in which the book is set, spring to technicolour life: a cigarette-puffing female doctor in St Petersburg, an American anthropologist researching sexual mores in the Andaman Islands, a rakish convalescent in Nice. Historical figures are sprinkled among the invented ones. The author’s prose is characteristically faultless.

These somewhat old-fashioned narrative skills tend to appeal more to readers than to novelty-seeking prize juries. But, as with Moncur’s piano-tuning, practising a craft to this degree of refinement is an impressive feat. This sweeping tale of love and revenge, fate and free will, surrender and control will delight its author’s many fans.