The plump rabbit with a red spotted bow knotted to its head. Fine, fawn-coloured angora fur, long floppy ears, black faced. He knew, even before he took in the flat face with the black penny eyes that it couldn’t be a rabbit. But he insisted on thinking of it as a rabbit, out of spite. One of those Dutch ones. What was it then? Pekinese seemed too obvious. It must be a shih tzu. He rolled the word malevolently around his mind.
 

She was wearing an equally red, equally fine woollen jersey. The dog looked out from under her arm, perched imperially between the straps of her leather burgundy bowling bag. He had to twist his legs to one side, squishing them together so she could get in next to him. There were other seats, nearer the back of the bus, but he knew that that would be the way. She smiled down at him. He wasn’t prepared for her pleasant features, her pale eyes smiling under arched brows. Her ‘thank you’ added a touch of grace. His legs sprang back, his right thigh just settling against hers. Now the dog - rabbit, he reminded himself - gazed up at him, its face scrunched with stupidity.

Behind him the couple couldn’t wait to pay obeisance. 'Isn’t he lovely?’ The young man cooed. His friend added her shrill glottal: ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’ The woman addressed the dog, patiently, ‘You’re a girl, aren’t you?’ Despite the inanity of the exchange her voice retained a simple ease. The bus jerked on. Another passenger, an older woman in a shapeless felt hat had joined in, at length, about her sister’s pekinese. Pure-bred like this one. Five or six more stops. He wondered how long he could take it. Four stops, now, along the dual carriageway. Suddenly, like a prisoner wanting release he pressed the buzzer. He stood and half-staggered as the bus came to a halt.

He didn’t acknowledge the driver’s look which was to reprimand him of the lack of good time. He had half a mile to walk. The voices had stopped. He thought he could smell a scent of fine, washed hair. Slowly the warm impress faded from his thigh.

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This is a history. It’s the story of one man - The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart, the subtitle tells us - but also the story of a century. It’s first entry (in Spanish, Mountstuart was born in Uruguay) is dated 1912, its last in 1991. 

In the hands of a less skilled writer the supposed journals of a man who was alive in all ten decades of the 20th century, who had a spat with Virginia Woolf, met Picasso and the Duke of Windsor and operated as a spy under Ian Fleming in the second world war might descend into a parody. But Boyd carries it off with great sensitivity and realism, underpinned with humour. He is wonderfully alive to to the desires and jealousies of young men coming of age in the inter-war period. So we read ‘Down the corridor Lucy lies in her bed - is she thinking of me, I wonder, as I think of her?’ and the pals’ need to arrange a ‘witnessed kiss.’

Despite the starry support cast, Boyd never looses emotional depth: the death of the narrator’s wife and child in the last days of the war is harrowing. In fact, most of the events of the 20th century touch him in some way, from the great strike of 1926 to the Biafran War and Bader-Meinhoff, but we never feel Boyd is straining to fit them all in, they come naturally to the narrator, whose voice changes subtly with age and circumstance. The epigrammatic form and natural solipsism of journals are suffused with the character's curiosity and humanity. We see, re-live, the century through the eyes of this man, Logan Mountstuart.

A post-script, though: Mountstuart’s narration ends with his death in France in 1991; Any Human Heart was published in 2002. Mountstuart’s final observations are warmly optimistic as he watches French youths on the beach and reflects on his own past ‘ . . . boys and girls are relaxed and at ease with each other in a manner that would have been unthinkable to schoolboys of my generation . . . ’ Had this novel been set later, continuing into this present millennium I wonder if Boyd would have been quite so positive. But then, perhaps the answer is there too: 'You must live the life you have been given.'

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An imagined stage, flickering like an old cathode ray screen rose between them. The scene a history play of scientists in white coats, formulas and official reports. Doctor and patient looked at each other; their eyes hinted at a smile, searched momentarily to collude in a mild joke. But off stage, under faded newspapers were the dead, the ones who had succumbed, still mourned. They kept silence.

The patient nodded and rose, discharged.

Doctor to patient: ‘Come back and see us again, before you do anything.’ And they both knew he would.

University of Warwick: Literature and Mental Health
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