Any Human Heart

The writer Logan Gonzago Mountstuart was born in 1906 and passed away on October 5, 1991, at the age of 85 from a heart attack. The disorganized autobiography of William Boyd is collected in his huge book Any Human Heart, which describes "my personal rollercoaster"—or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster," but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." Mountstuart chronicles his unplanned evolution as a writer, beginning with his early years in Montevideo as the son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, and continuing through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford. Following a lengthy fifty years of mediocrity, disappointments, and setbacks—both personal and professional—early and easy prosperity gives way to drunkenness, many failed marriages, incarceration, and extreme poverty.

With an incredible ensemble of supporting characters, Mountstuart's sorry tale also tells the story of a British way of life in irreversible decline, taking in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, and even the Baader-Meinhof gang. The longest and greatest part of the novel occurs in the middle, when Mount Stuart, accompanied by the really reprehensible Duke and Duchess of Windsor, becomes entangled in one of Britain's most enigmatic wartime mysteries. Despite Boyd's occasional overt tongue-in-cheek moments—the Wall Street Crash is described with really jaw-dropping inelegance—Any Human Heart is an overall clever, creative, and ultimately touching book. Boyd is able to create not just a captivating 20th century but also an anti-hero who approaches passive grandeur in the form of Logan Mountstuart, the unfortunate character. **Stewart, Alan, Amazon.co.uk