I wanted to write a good review of Trio by William Boyd but regretfully this novel is quite a disappointment. It’s as if he had a tidy-up in his study, found some drafts of bits and pieces, decided they were too good to throw out and combined them into a novel.
There’s an interesting structure developed around taking 3 people and telling their individual stories and also how their paths cross with each other. Had he done this with just two characters, Talbot Kydd the film producer and Anny Viklund the actress, there would have been a good novella here. He could then have done a standalone short story about the blocked writer, Elfrida Wing.
This is what he had the sense to do with ‘The Dreams of Bethany Melmoth’. This is a novella along with some short stories. But ‘Trio’ simply meanders along. The characters show little development. Nor do they show any motivation to progress to where they might want to be. It did start to pick up about two-thirds of the way through. And to be honest, I persevered to this point simply out of curiosity. I wanted to see how Boyd would extricate himself from this mess.
There’s plenty else that simply doesn’t work. The period setting of 1968 seems pointless apart from giving some justification for Anny’s boyfriend, Jacques Soldat, a revolutionary philosopher. It’s not established with any skill. WB seems to have sent a research assistant off to surf through Wikipedia for lists of pop singers then popular. WB then plonks them into the text in the hope that it will give us the flavour of the period.
The next time he has a tidy-up, he needs a better editor to help him piece it together.