“Trio” by William Boyd
This latest novel by one of my favourite authors transports us nostalgically back into the summer of 1968, and as ever William Boyd is pitch perfect on his period settings. The world is enduring the Vietnam War, rioting in Paris, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
The location is Brighton, where a movie is being filmed with a Hollywood star, Anny Viklund, one of the three main characters who make up the “Trio” and whose lives we follow during the months of production. She has an ex-husband who causes her problems with the FBI and the UK police when he absconds from justice in the States, and is deemed to be in Europe. Her new partner is based in Paris, and we witness her involvement with her co-star, Troy a pop singer seeking an alternative career.
Talbot Kydd, the film’s producer is ex-Army, a man with a secret existence which helps him escape from the restrictions of his family life, and his earlier military life and colleagues are part of his backstory that the reader is given an overview of. His managerial oversight of the filming is never smooth, and William Boyd’s experience of film scripts, and filming comes across with authenticity.
The final lead character is Elfrida Wing, a novelist who has not published anything for years, but her writer’s block is linked with her love of vodka which she hides from her husband in bottles of white vinegar, Reggie Tipton, the film’s director. Oddly he is trying to rename himself Rodrigo, and has his own distractions with Janet, another author who he enlists to help with script revisions. The storyline follows Elfrida’s sad decline with the bottle, her continued attempts to find a subject to write about, and with the location of the filming; Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set come in as a subplot.
There are a milliard of other personalities enhancing the main structure of this novel, providing distractions and detours to the lives of the principal trio. Their lives are the main focus, and they are certainly an odd selection of individuals, all with their own secrets. It is against the making of the film that we experience not only the progress of the planned movie, but the disintegration of their previous semi-artificial existences. Whilst the main part of the book is in and around Brighton and the south coast, there are frequent trips up to London, and then an escapade across to Paris, and beyond.
As I read this book it came across as one William Boyd wanted to write about the film industry, with the knowledge he has gained over the years, and he has come up with a complex interlinking set of plots, and the lives of the “Trio,” played out against an authentic setting of Britain in the late sixties, will please his legion of readers.
