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| William Boyd |
The books of my life
William Boyd: ‘Fantasy is a genre that I cannot abide any more’
The novelist on why he can’t read JRR Tolkien, being hooked on Muriel Spark and obsessed with James Joyce
William Boyd
Fri 1 Nov 2024 10.00 GMT
My earliest reading memory
In west Africa, where I was born in 1952, in Ghana to be precise. Aged about five, reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book in a large-format, copiously illustrated edition.
My favourite book growing up
The Basil Duke Lee stories by F Scott Fitzgerald. They are not well known. I read them in my early teens. They are heavily autobiographical – Fitzgerald was writing about his own adolescence. For the first time, it seemed, a writer spoke directly to me. “Yes,” I thought, “this is exactly how I feel.”
The book that changed me as a teenager
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I read it, utterly rapt, on an overnight flight from London to Lagos where my family was living at the time. It was 1970 and I was 18 years old. I thought it was the most wonderful novel ever written: funny, cruel, absurd – defiantly, brilliantly anti-war. And I was flying into Nigeria’s civil war, the Biafran war. Art and life conjoined.
The book that changed my mind
Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary. Another African book about a young Nigerian clerk working for a district officer in the 1920s. When I was in my teens, growing up in Nigeria, we had a cook called Mr Johnson. That was what drew me to Cary’s masterpiece and it was revelatory in its empathy and honesty. Cary opened my eyes to the Africa I was living in. I later, coincidentally, wrote an introduction to the book and, later still, adapted it for a film directed by Bruce Beresford.
The book that made me want to be a writer
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. The novel is set in Sierra Leone during the second world war – a west African country I had visited, very similar to the two countries I had lived in, Ghana and Nigeria. I read it in my late teens and for the first time I saw how personal experience of a place – its landscape, atmosphere, weather, textures – could be transformed into fiction, into art.
The author I came back to
Muriel Spark. I think I first read her work too young; I couldn’t connect with her clever, oblique spareness, her dry, ironic take on the world. Then I was asked to review A Far Cry from Kensington, many years later. And I was suddenly hooked. I’ve read everything she’s written.
The book I reread
Ulysses by James Joyce. I am an obsessive Joycean, as fascinated by the man as by the work. But I keep going back to Ulysses. I have about eight copies of it for some reason.
The book I could never read again
The Lord of the Rings. I read it aged 12 and was entranced. That is the age to read Tolkien. Fantasy is a genre that I cannot abide any more.
The book I discovered later in life
The Untouchable by John Banville.
The book I am currently reading
The Echoes by Evie Wyld.
My comfort read
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
