Totally enjoyed this and I'm kinda sad to have finished it. I really have felt that I have spent the last month travelling with Logan Mountsturt through his life and diaries from 1923 ( when he was 17) to 1991 and his death. I loved his early life stories, which he wrote about retrospectively, and the mad games he played in his school with his 2 best mates. It all seemed lots of fun, but highly competitive and crazy. Logan's 2 mates were his family really and it's sad to see how the relationships with his friends change over his lifetime. THey all had a full life of promise ahead of them, but like real life Logan did not always take the life chances available to him. WHilst at other times his life took crazy turns and great leaps. All in all Logan's life was the life of a survivor. A life with lots of sadness, great happiness, and peopled with just a few people who he truely, truely loved and trusted. THat's what upset me about this book, how few people truely were loved by Logan.
I had a love / hate/ infuriationwith Logan through this book. Getting inside the head of a rather pompous, lazy and privileged teenage boy/ middle aged man is not a place I travel to often but I kinda enjoyed it. Duringthe Second World War things did tragically fall apart for Logan and seeing him slowly build a life back for himself was an emotional read. His diaries are just so honest and William Boyd sure writes beautifully in his voice. PArts of his diary made me howl with laughter and at other times I was in floods of tears. I also liked the quirky famous people popping up in this book, ( he met Picasso, Hemmingway Ian Fleming, Virigina Wolf...but these characters were always just sidelines and always highly obnoxious according to Logan!)
Logan sure did travel, see the world and witness a lot. He was born in Uruguay, studied at Oxford, worked in France, , went to the Spanish civil war and was nearly blown up, wrote a novel, spied on Edward Vlll and Wallis Simpson. ( They were amazingly foul characters!), ended up in solitary confinement in Switzerland for 2 years because of pissing them off. Returned home to some tragic news in London, went to live in New York, became addicted to drink, drugs and extra marital sex, ran away to Nigeria and got involved in the Biafrian War of independence whilst finding peace as a Uni lecturer. Retired, came back to the UK as a poverty stricken pensioner, who was living off dog food. started selling German Left Wing newspapers to students and inadvertently ended up almost smuggling nitroglycerine for some German Anarchists and then finally luckily( phewwww!) ended up in some sort of semi-peaceful existence in France. All a great read!
Logan lives an interesting life but more by mistake than by anything else. I'm sure if I had met him I don't think I would have warmed to him at all or ever even given his life story any consideration but underneath Logan's annoying persona there were absolute pearls of wisdom written by him in this book. The thing about Logan was he had a strong spirit and he survived. Many of his friends didn't.
His was a life, underneath it all, an ordinary life. A life full of promise, adventures, great happiness, regret and deep sadness. ULtimately a life like any of us.
A highly recommended read!
