Any Human Heart

Logan Mountstuart was born in 1906, the year of my own fathers birth. The early chapters, about his schoolboy and undergraduate years, set the tone and the style very clearly. His Catholic upbringing seems to have made very little impression on him, in particular as regards sins of the flesh, and his faith drops away early. That neatly closes off any risk of profundity or introspection from that quarter. It is at this stage also that we meet the two, at a stretch three, friends he ever seems to have made in his entire life, and the friendships never descend to any particular emotional or intellectual depth. The women come and go, and the focus is strongly on the physical side of his relationships with them. Even this side is not explored to any extent - it may all have been strictly missionary-position stuff for all the story suggests to the contrary. What is quite clear is that there was only one real love among them, and when that is tragically lost the book comes as near as it ever does to suggesting the grief and anguish that I would have thought any human heart must have undergone, and even that figures very little in the subsequent narrative. Logan has a son and a daughter by his two marriages, and he is admirably candid and convincing in conceding that as far as his son is concerned they had next to no relationship worth the name. For some of us, to have our own children is beyond comparison the greatest experience in living, and to lose a child the nightmare beyond all nightmares. What emotions Logan went through when it happened to him is a matter that we have to read between the lines as best we can.

He lived through turbulent times, but this is not the place to look for profound reflections on those. He is present in Spain during the civil war, but it is treated as a backdrop for his encounters with Hemingway and Picasso. We are kept entertained by the depictions of Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Ian Fleming and others too numerous to mention. The story really caught fire, for me, in the sharply-narrated and genuinely involving tale of his experiences at the hands of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during his wartime naval service in the Bahamas. It starts to flag a little in the post-war world, and by now you will expect to be told that there is nothing about the nuclear arms race and nothing about the Cuban missile crisis, although Kennedys assassination gets a fleeting mention. He does, however, go through a rough patch financially, and if you can take the episode of his consequent involvement with the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction seriously thats more than I can do.

The narration never really escapes from the schoolboy mentality with which it begins, but some of the descriptions of the depradations of advancing age on the narrator are genuinely touching. It is all very readable, and needless to say very skilfully written. I would call it a very good potboiler with pretensions, and I have rated it as such.