Love is Blind
William Boyd
Viking £18.99

Review by Barclay McBain

SEEING is believing. Or is it? This question is at the heart of William Boyd's stunning new novel. Brodie Moncur, the piano tuner central character from the Scottish Borders in Love is Blind, is in no doubt: seeing is believing. He believes unconditionally and irrefutably in Lydia (known as Lika) Blum, a Russian soprano whom he meets in Paris and falls desperately in love with, setting off a train of events that takes them from the French capital to St Petersburg, the Mediterranean, Edinburgh and back whence they began their intense affair.

Boyd is in familiar territory and in a familiar period with this novel: Europe as the 19th century ends and a new one begins. Think of The New Confessions, Any Human Heart and Restless. There is an element of the picaresque that Love is Blind shares with the first two above but Boyd has so much new material and such a compelling tale to tell that there is no danger of the reader thinking she or he has been here before.

The novel opens in 1894 with Brodie working for the piano maker Channon & Co in Edinburgh. He goes home to tell his family he is being sent to Paris to develop the company's business there. His father Malky, “a dark singularity”, is a firebrand Presbyterian minister; widowed, he is a black hole sucking the life out of his children other than Brodie, whom he hates for disobeying him.

In Paris, Brodie suggests approaching and paying piano virtuosi to play and raise the profile of Channon's instruments. He concludes a deal with the monstrous John Kilbarron, “the Irish Liszt” (a showman like Malky) and his equally hideous brother Malachi. At a concert he sees Lika, who lives with John Kilbarron. She “stood at the very limits of both of the lenses of his Franklin [bifocal] spectacles – move and squint as he might, he still couldn't bring her into focus”. Later, alone together, Brodie must take off his glasses to be given her special kiss. “You're just a blur”, he says.

His focus on Lika becomes acute when they become clandestine lovers. But, after a confrontation with Malachi, he has his first attack of tuberculosis, aged 27, and goes to Nice to recuperate. In a high wind he rescues the hat of a fellow patient, a Russian doctor (the first of three incidents involving windblown hats that impact on Brodie and the reader) who implores him to stay away from Russian actresses but who accepts that he will not: “I always think a life without complications isn't really a life … we're made for complications, we human beings.”

Complications there are aplenty as Brodie is wrongly accused of fraud at Channon, loses his job, moves to St Petersburg with the Kilbarrons and Lika to work for a wealthy widowed music lover, then is caught by Malachi in bed with Lika.

Malachi sets out his terms for keeping the affair secret but Brodie perpetrates an act of subtle piano sabotage, with good cause, that has a humiliating impact and results in a pistol duel. Lika and he flee St Petersburg with her dog, Cesar, moving from Biarritz to Edinburgh then Nice as the new century unfolds, Malachi the would-be nemesis somehow on their trail.

Having taken decisive action, Lika tells Brodie: “Look at your love for me. It's blind. You don't see me as I really am. All the nuances of Lika Blum. The light and the dark. You just see the light. You just see what you want to see.”

There is more to Lika than meets the eye, including Brodie's suspicions about the appropriation by Kilbarron of a melody by the young piano tuner, a song that had been the catalyst of all the happiness and unhappiness in his life, he realises.

But seeing is believing in Lika, remaining steadfast and true, even when his travels take him to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Tropics to work for an American woman, an anthropologist named Page Arbogast.

Boyd has a wonderful sense of place and time, from his description of reinforcements being built around Paris for a future conflict to an anarchist bomb attack on a government minister in pre-revolutionary Russia and the simmering melting pot of Trieste, peppering the story with the names of classical pianists from the time performing on instruments made by actual manufacturers.

He also seems to invoke the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson. RLS provides a prologue on love. The Master of Ballantrae, with its subject the conflict between two brothers, is read by Brodie in St Petersburg; Lika and he take the name Balfour, RLS's mother's maiden name, on their travels; and Stevenson is a fellow consumptive who moved to an equally far-flung place with his American wife (Brodie's fidelity stops a relationship developing with Page). Also, each had a loyal dog.

Boyd wears his research lightly. The accounts of fine tuning a grand piano (or not, as the situation dictates) read as compellingly as anything in the book. He is a master of plot and pacing, carrying the reader along with him so that she or he cannot wait to find out what will happen next in a novel that explores themes of mutability, loyalty, deceit, revenge, kindness, cruelty, fate, random choice, goodness, perceptiveness and, above all else, love.

We cannot but admire Boyd. This heart-rending novel is compulsively readable.

William Boyd will be talking about his life as a creator of many fictions at The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh at 7.30pm on Wednesday September 19 (£21.50 plus booking fee http://www.assemblyroomsedinburgh.co.uk/attend-an-event/what-s-on.html)