The Romantic by William Boyd review – a swashbuckling adventure

At the beginning of The Romantic, William Boyd asks: “What do we leave behind us when we die?” Posterity – and legacy – are questions that have preoccupied him for decades. There are few writers today as obsessed by the biographical – or faux-biographical – form. Over the course of his career, Boyd has specialised in examining the fictitious lives of his characters with wit and authority. He has now returned to life writing with this account of Cashel Greville Ross, the self-described “bastard son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocrat and a Scottish governess”.

We follow Ross as he variously assumes the personae of writer, adventurer, soldier, brewer and general observer of the 19th century. Told in the third person, rather than the first person of Boyd’s other biographical novels, The Romantic blends wryly fictionalised real-life events and characters with a creative description of the social, political and romantic upheavals within its protagonist’s life. There is, naturally, an all-consuming love affair, along with a suitably colourful supporting cast of rogues, swindlers, villains and even the odd honest man.

For a less talented writer, this approach would run the risk of diminishing returns. Logan Mountstuart (of Boyd’s Any Human Heart), Ross and The New Confessions’s John James Todd are themselves almost Zelig-like figures, who are defined more by their environment and encounters than their individual traits. Yet this does not mean that the protagonist of The Romantic is boring. On the contrary, Boyd stuffs his life story so full of incident and adventure that it verges on the absurd. The narrative stretches from the early 19th century to an epilogue in 1882, includes guest appearances from everyone from Lord Byron to Sir Richard Burton and encompasses locations that include Ireland, Oxford, Africa, America, Venice, India and the Marshalsea prison in Southwark.

This is a rambunctious, swashbuckling tale, told with panache by a master storyteller. Boyd is sufficiently confident in his material to portray historical incidents and characters with casual relish; the battle of Waterloo, for instance, is seen largely from the perspective of a dysentery-beset drummer. This marriage between the intimate and the epic continually produces striking vignettes that illuminate the wider narrative. When Ross finds himself on the Italian beach where Shelley’s body is being burned, Boyd vividly describes the “curious, putrefying, blue-grey hue” of what remains of the poet’s flesh. The reader can practically smell the rot and salt and smoke.

Had any other writer come up with The Romantic, it might be called a magnum opus, but longstanding admirers of Boyd have come to expect, and delight in, his generous, maximalist approach to both storyline and character. So perhaps it is inevitable that his prose, usually so elegant, occasionally tips over into overripe melodrama. It is understandable that Ross, discovering his true paternity, might curse his real mother as “you whore from hell”, but few writers could get away with a sentence such as the one that has his protagonist vowing to “ruin Shay Corcoran utterly, rescue [my] daughters from his evil influence, and marry Fannie Broome”.

Thankfully such excesses are rare. And they do not distract from the addictive readability of The Romantic, the narrative of which follows a simple but enjoyable formula. Ross involves himself in an unlikely escapade; it appears to go well; it turns out exceptionally badly; Ross escapes through some quirk of chance. There is a gleeful attitude in playing fast and loose with history and certain details, such as the unfortunate end of the Nile explorer John Hanning Speke, which could easily have emerged from the pages of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman chronicles.

And there’s a serious point amid the fun. There’s an apt description of memory as “a fawning courtier to its master the autobiographer” and Boyd’s delight in exploring the unreliability of recollection permeates the narrative. We are consistently invited to question how far Ross’s exploits are “true” and how far they are self-perpetuated creation. Towards the end, his grand inamorata sighs that her life has been “all very boring, compared to [yours]”. Those who fall in love with The Romantic may wonder whether their own lives lack adventure. Surrender to this fine novel’s spell, though, and it will vicariously supply more than enough thrills for anyone.

• The Romantic by William Boyd is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply