A Very Good Boyd

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Historians may someday call this the golden age of the important British novelist, when a vast and talented cohort of writers now mostly in their 50s — Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie — dominate bookstores and Man Booker Prize lists, as well as talk shows and tabloids. One name, however, might unfairly miss the list: William Boyd, a contemporary of the aforementioned and their equal [an error occurred while processing this directive] in every respect, except perhaps critical plaudits and household fame. There is a reason: Boyd lives a double life.

Since his rollicking 1981 debut, A Good Man in Africa, about a hapless young diplomat in chaotic east Africa, Boyd has turned out nine increasingly polished novels and three collections of stories. Some of his works (An Ice-Cream War, Brazzaville Beach) are drawn from his childhood spent in east Africa, and two, Ice-Cream and Any Human Heart, were Booker nominees. Boyd does not shrink from attention: his opinionated 1998 biography of a neglected abstract expressionist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, caused a storm on both sides of the Atlantic. Rock star David Bowie feted important art writers at a London party where art historian John Richardson spoke on Tate's relationship with Pablo Picasso. Turns out Tate never existed; Boyd's book was really a novel. Bowie and Richardson were in on the hoax, which fooled many critics.

If the critics have had trouble taking Boyd as seriously as they do his peers, then the other half of his life doesn't exactly enhance his literary reputation. Two of his novels, A Good Man and the U.S.-themed Stars and Bars, were made into feature films, and he did the adaptations. In addition, Boyd has written screenplays for half a dozen other films (including Chaplin and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and last year's acclaimed bbc dramatic TV series about Shakespeare's love life, A Waste of Shame. He has also been a feature-film director (The Trench) and co-producer (A Good Man). This month he makes his big-screen debut as an actor, playing himself in the low-budget British comedy Rabbit Fever. Oh, and his new novel Restless has just been published, with a $190,000 promotion budget, a 10-city author tour and posters on London buses.

So is Boyd a novelist who dabbles in film, or a movie wannabe who writes on the side? "I'm first and foremost a novelist," he says politely but firmly from his home in the Dordogne, in southwestern France. The late-summer sun is blazing, but inside the ancient farmhouse's half-meter-thick walls, the air is as cool as in a movie theater. (Boyd and his wife also have a terraced house with much thinner walls in London's Chelsea neighborhood.) "My screen life is a fascinating sideline. I enjoy leaving the solitude of the study to collaborate, to meet and mix with people in the film industry. The world of the novelist is total autonomy. It's very good to have this other thing going on in your life."