John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd's novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He's also an obsessive moviegoer who refuses to watch anything which doesn't meet his one absolute criterion: 'he believed, with a fundamental zeal, that a true film, a film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending.' It's no surprise when Clearwater ends up drowning himself, because in novels by William Boyd life rarely obeys the conventions of upbeat movies. It obeys the conventions of novels by William Boyd, in which the world will usually contrive a neatly ironic retort to whatever schemes or patterns the characters try to impose on it.

LRB 23 May 2002 | PDF Download