Customer Reviews

The New Confessions

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William Boyd is a terrific storyteller. His prose is of high quality, characterizations livid and entertaining. I'm glad to say 'The New Confessions' is standard William Boyd material. It is a faux autobiography of a Scotsman as he reminisces through his full life of the first three quarters of the twentieth century. He experiences the horror of trench warfare in WW I, he becomes a famous silent film director of the Germany avant-garde cinema, and then lives several years in turbulent Hollywood before retiring on an island in the Mediterranian. He is no hero, and not a particularly nice guy. But is life story is very rich; I wish I had a grandfather like him!

However 'The New Confessions is not perfect. The ending is a bit of a disappointment, and overall the book seems too much like his 'Any Human Heart' (..which he wrote later but I read earlier). I do wish William Boyd would return to the stellar form he demonstrated with 'Brazzaville Beach', a less ambitious but much more powerful novel.


Bottom line: thoroughly competent but Boyd can do better. Still, any average effort by Boyd is worthy read.

For the life of me, I will never ever forget the first and last sentences of this book, the slightly-damaged hardbound edition of which I bought for only a dollar(!) in a discount section of a bookstore here in Manila in 1994! A rare, serendipitous literary find for me, indeed. Truly captivating, a biography like this of one John James Todd can only be created by one destined to be a world literary giant. Medicine, Mathematics, Philosophy, 20th Century History, Cinema -- all combined and meticulously woven in one great book of insights. It is as if every turn of a page of this book, a hologram appears and all you have to do is watch, laugh and weep as the 3-Dimensional events happen grandly, clearly, colorfully and ceaselessly before your very eyes.

This fictional memoir displays Boyd's consummate skill and style to full effect, ranging across time an place to create a vivid tale. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is (perhaps arguably) first tell-all memoir, and here Boyd updates it through the reminisces of James Todd. The story unfolds chronologically from his birth in 1899 and upbringing in Edinburgh to the 1970s, when he sits incognito on a quiet island writing his memoirs. The years between are a picaresque journey through the first half of the last century and one man's attempt to create meaning in his life.

The early years in his domineering father's household document an unhappy child yearning for love and approval. His father's quest to perfect and patent medicines provides an uncommonly interesting background for this. When a family friend introduces him to photography, the die is cast. As a teenager, like so many British men of his age, he is swallowed by the first World War, where he is wounded at Ypres. Here, Boyd's descriptions manage to breath fresh life into carnage whose horror has been well-documented. Fortuitously, he is then transferred to a propaganda unit, where his talent in photography is applied to the new realm of film. Captured by the Germans, he languishes in prison, where a guard befriends him and gives him a copy of Rousseau's Confessions to pass the time. The work insinuates itself into him, and it percolates in him in the postwar years as he works in the London silent film industry. Despite marrying and fathering several children, his ambitions remain thwarted and he moves to Berlin to pursue his pet project of making an epic version of Rousseau's book.

In Weimar Berlin he embraces the vibrant (if pfenningless) art community and reconnects with his former guard, who is now an actor. Working together, and with Armenian producers, their careers start to take off and Todd becomes embroiled in a lifelong love affair with an actress. Boyd's description of the inter-war Berlin film scene is so vivid, and the discussion of Todd's career so convincing that one is tempted to put the book down and rush to the video store to see his films. With the juice to get his pet Rousseau project made, Todd throws himself full-tilt into the project, only to see the emergence of "talkies" scuttle it. This propels him to Hollywood, where makes some quiet B-Westerns embedded with subtle social messages until t he next war finds him scrambling around as a war correspondent for third-tier U.S. newspapers.

Following WWII, he falls afoul of the McCarthy witch hunts for communist in the entertainment industry and appears before HUAC. Here, is perhaps the book's one flaw. The HUAC hearings provide Todd with an opportunity to both stay afloat by naming names (some of whom have already named him), and exact revenge on his longtime archnemesis-but he doesn't take it. Although he's presented as variously idealistic and honorable, it's the one time in the book where the character doesn't hold true. And from here, the book bogs down a little, as Todd's current situation as apparent exile starts to loom over the proceedings. Despite a somewhat unsatisiying ending, the story's overall quality is head and shoulders above the pack. Once again Boyd has researched a plethora of subjects and places, and recreates them perfectly. At the same time he occasionally deploys a light comic touch to lighten this story of the search for meaning and the role of chance in life.

This novel is so bold. It's protagonist essays a contemprary film version of Rousseau's CONFESSIONS. The aspiration eats up his life, a lifetime which fits nicely into our century and the development of cinematic art. The reader travels through early century London and Gernmany and eventually to latter day Los Angeles. As soon as I finished this book I devoured the Rousseau and loved it as much.

Reading this book, I was reminded of why, despite Rousseau's many shortcomings and faults, I've always loved his Confessions: It's BECAUSE of his all too human shortcomings and faults. That said, our protagonist herein, John James Todd, is not exactly a modern day John-Jacques. The most obvious flaw is that the caustic tone Boyd lends him herein is almost exactly that of Nat Tate, the protagonist in his later book Any Human Heart, rather than the lilting, self-pitying one of Rousseau's Confessions. Still, it is impossible not to sympathise with Todd in his narrative and regard him, if not as a man more sinned against than sinning, than at least as one equally sinned against as sinning.

Todd, like Rousseau, is very unreliable as narrator, and at some parts of the book it can become a sort of pleasant distraction to discover the narrative inaccuracies: My personal favourite was his quoting (actually misquoting, as he himself says) from T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton" whilst in Germany in the 20's, even though Eliot didn't even begin writing the poem until the 30's.

It's all very confusing at times reading a book called The New Confessions by author Boyd which consists of a confessional narrative by character Todd written at the end of his life which was largely devoted to the creation of a film version of Rousseau's Confessions. It's all rather like a literary version of a Russian matryoshka doll with progressively smaller dolls enclosed inside it.

Be all this as it may, one can't help but be drawn to a cad with a vision surrounded by pious hypocrites with no vision at all, save getting and spending - which is basically the set-up here. And, underlying it all, the reiterated Boyd/Todd theme that we are all playthings of Chance, regardless of how we try to delude ourselves:

"There is no guarantee of good fortune, no assurance that your allies will always be staunch, that unfairness and indifference will not always prevail. So why in these cases (Jean Jacques's case) does the world howl paranoic, lunatic, misanthrope, ingrate, egomaniac? ........I will tell you why. Because it makes people feel better, more secure. If they can lay all the blame on the victim....Chance, the random and haphazard, the contingent, do not really dictate the way the world turns."

And who does not have more than a bit of the Rousseauvian in him in the sense that: "When I act it is because I am impelled by something irresistible within me and seldom as a result of some well-plotted strategy."

A flawed book, whose covers the prospective reader will hopefully chance to open.

I'm a great admirer of Willian Boyd, a person who has enjoyed his earlier novels. I was really looking forward to reading "The New Confessions". I started it and I persisted through the first 100 pages or so, but I couldn't finish it - a very rare way for me to treat a book. But the protagonist of "Confessions" is such a bitter misanthropic voice that the book was spoiled for me.

I urge those who haven't yet read any Boyd to begin with one of his books of shorter fiction, or best of all, with "Brazzaville Beach", one of the best novels I've read in years. Then follow up with "Restless", another excellent and innovative book.

Perhaps after those two, if you're as disenchanted with "Confessions" as I was, you'll still read Boyd's next work. Had this been my first exposure to him, it might have been my last.

A wonderful rampage through the twentieth century in the vein of the best eighteenth and nineteenth century chroniclers, Boyd's fictional hero is so well drawn, so detailed and so human that each page produces new fascinations. From the turn of the century until the 1970s when he stands on the wealthy promontory of life, by the Mediterranean, looking back on his journey, Boyd produces a young man desperate to (1) lose his virginity (2) avoid dying in a trench somewhere near Ypres during the Great War and (3) find a purpose.

I was lent a copy of this book by a friend and I have enjoyed it so much that, not having read Boyd before, I have ordered two other Boyds plus this one, so I can return my borrowed copy. It should be compulsory reading for 18 year-olds studying English lit, but I suspect it won't be because it will be deemed 'too long.' Although 476 pages, they are long pages (small letters, 40+ lines) and the book, sized the same as a 'typical' paperback, would weigh in at closer to 700 pages, although the length detracts not a jot from the book's brilliance and it never feels padded, unlike many shorter books.

The first two thirds of this book contains some of the best and most gripping storytelling I've read in years. I was completely hooked on both style and substance in the unfolding of the life John James Todd. Some of the experiences of his youth rank among the best fiction I've read in decades. Then, sadly something changed. Events seem to get bogged down a bit once the book shifts to the inside the movie indusrty angle. The characters and plot seems circular and plodding. Things pick up again at the end with the whole HUAC thing, and that helps make the book complete.

That reservation stated, I still highly recommend this fine novel highly.

William Boyd seems to have become a popular favorite in recent years with his (to my mind) rather pedestrian thrillers, which is probably good for his bank balance but isn't doing his earlier, long-time readers any favours. I loved "The New Confessions" - it's a big, bold saga about one man's journey through the early part of the 20th century, and evokes the beginnings of film-making the early days of cinema brilliantly. It may be a more demanding read than, say "Restless" but it's much more rewarding.

William Boyd is without a doubt a literary genius. I loved this
book and I tore through it at a rate of knots which is unusual for
me because I usually take my time to read a book. Boyd is one of our
greatest living writers. I urge anyone to get totally lost in the strange
world of John James Todd.