Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, writer, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism and abject poverty.

Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere author William Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk


From Publishers Weekly
Surely one of the most beguiling books of this season, this rich, sophisticated, often hilarious and disarming novel is the autobiography of a typical Englishman as told through his lifelong journal. Born to British parents in Uruguay in 1906, Logan Mountstuart attends an English prep school where he makes two friends who will be his touchstones for the next eight decades. The early entries in his journal, which record his sexual explorations and his budding ambitions, provide a clear picture of the snobbery and genteel brutality of the British social system. Logan is a decent chap, filled with a moral idealism that he will never lose, although his burning sense of justice will prove inconvenient in later years. He goes down from Oxford with a shameful Third, finds early success as a novelist, marries a rich woman he doesn't love, escapes to Spain to fight in the civil war and is about to embark on a happy existence with his second wife when WWII disrupts his and his generation's equilibrium. He's sent on a na‹ve spying mission by British Naval Intelligence and imprisoned for two years. On his release, he finds that tragedy has struck his family. Logan's creativity is stunted, and he slides into alcoholism, chronic infidelity and loneliness. "I believe my generation was cursed by the war," Logan says, and this becomes the burden of the narrative. He resorts to journalism to earn a living, specializing in pieces about the emerging stars of the art world, whom he encounters-somewhat like Zelig-in social situations. Logan's picaresque journey through the 20th century never seems forced, however. His meetings with Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Hemingway and Ian Fleming are adroitly and credibly interposed into the junctures of his life. This flawed yet immensely appealing protagonist is one of Boyd's most distinctive creations, and his voice-articulate, introspective, urbane, stoically philosophical in the face of countless disappointments-engages the reader's empathy. Logan is a man who sees his bright future dissipate and his great love destroyed, and yet can look back with "a strange sense of pride" that he's "managed to live in every decade of this long benighted century." His unfulfilled life, with his valiant efforts to be morally responsible, to create and, finally, just to get by, is a universal story, told by a master of narrative. Boyd, back in top form, has crafted a novel at least as beautifully nuanced as A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach. Logan's journal entries are so candid and immediate it's difficult to believe he isn't real. And after 496 pages, it's hard to say good-bye.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Told entirely in the form of journal entries, this lavishly imagined novel seeks to explore the complexity of an individual human life responding to history and change. The journal's author is a cultured, intelligent man named Logan Mountstuart. Beginning in 1923 with his schoolboy days in England, Mountstuart takes us through college, experiences in 1930s Paris, adventures as a spy for England during World War II, and, finally, his golden years and eventual death. This is a masterfully drawn historical novel, utterly convincing in its depiction of events, but Boyd (Armadillo) also explores the nuances of Mountstuart's complex interior life: his youthful ambitions, his yearning for love, and the challenges posed by loss and disappointment. The result is brimming with vitality, pathos, and psychological intimacy. Enthusiastically recommended.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Writing a novel in the form of a personal journal is no easy task, but Boyd pulls it off. Mountstuart's journals begin in 1923, when he is attending an English public school, and end shortly before his death at 85. His varied, continent-hopping career includes stints as a novelist, country gentleman, secret agent, literature professor, and member of a terrorist cell, and he rubs shoulders with Picasso and James Joyce, just to name a few--all duly footnoted by the journals' supposed editor. Mountstuart's story is cleft in two by a tragedy that occurs at the close of World War II. Afterward, his life settles into a kind of longeur, reflected in the novel in stretches of not much happening. Things pick up when our hero, now an old man, nevertheless embarks on one last adventure before retiring to a French farm. Though (like life) not every page is riveting, the book is a remarkable achievement, documenting one man's passage from the arrogance and optimism of youth to the resignation of old age. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“Its pleasures are endless. . . . Supremely entertaining.” –The Washington Post Book World

"Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense imaginative detail, about characters with complex, and convincing, emotional lives. . . . I've already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?"--Peter Green, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The sort of rare novel that redeems the essential purpose of prose fiction. . . . A high celebration of the plain fun of a life lived with relentless appetite and reasonable grace.”—The Baltimore Sun

“Entertaining and moving. . . . Can be read with sheer pleasure not only for the delicacy of its emotions but for the truth of its perceptions. Like saying goodbye to a good friend, it’s hard to see this brilliant novel come to an end.” —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A wonderful character—and a wonderful book. . . . Boyd persuades you that you’ve read the confidences of a real, flawed, marginal character battered by every malice and caprice of 20th-century history. ” —The Seattle Times

“A pleasure front to back, and a fond tip of the bowler hat to the upper-class fiction spawned by a long-gone world.”— Newsweek

“One of the most skillful and appealing writers at work today.”—The Atlantic Monthly

“A novel of deep humanity and insight.”—Newsday



Review
?Its pleasures are endless. . . . Supremely entertaining.? ?The Washington Post Book World

"Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense imaginative detail, about characters with complex, and convincing, emotional lives. . . . I've already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?"--Peter Green, Los Angeles Times Book Review

?The sort of rare novel that redeems the essential purpose of prose fiction. . . . A high celebration of the plain fun of a life lived with relentless appetite and reasonable grace.??The Baltimore Sun

?Entertaining and moving. . . . Can be read with sheer pleasure not only for the delicacy of its emotions but for the truth of its perceptions. Like saying goodbye to a good friend, it?s hard to see this brilliant novel come to an end.? ?The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

?A wonderful character?and a wonderful book. . . . Boyd persuades you that you?ve read the confidences of a real, flawed, marginal character battered by every malice and caprice of 20th-century history. ? ?The Seattle Times

?A pleasure front to back, and a fond tip of the bowler hat to the upper-class fiction spawned by a long-gone world.?? Newsweek

?One of the most skillful and appealing writers at work today.??The Atlantic Monthly

?A novel of deep humanity and insight.??Newsday

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The author of Armadillo, The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach -- the novelist who has been called a "master storyteller" (Chicago Tribune) and "a gutsy writer who is good company to keep" (Time) -- now gives us his most entertaining, sly and compelling novel to date, a novel that evokes the tumult, events and iconic faces of our time, as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart -- writer, lover and man of the world -- through his intimate journals. Here is the "riotous and disorganized reality" of Mountstuart's eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic and humorous aspects. The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book; then on to Paris (where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al.) and to Spain where he covers the civil war. During World War II, we see him as an agent for Naval Intelligence, becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer in the world of 1950s abstract expressionism, then on to West Africa, to London (where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang) and, finally, to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity. A moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Los Angeles Times

Boyd takes tremendous risks in making this not over-talented, ambitious sensualist draw so full and unflattering a portrait of himself. That he succeeds so triumphantly is chiefly a tribute to the never-failing realism of his historical ghost-raising, the rich and loving detail with which he invests each fresh scene and character, the pitch-perfect ear with which he catches the musings, not only of Logan himself but also of his friends and relatives, at each successive stage of their lives. — Peter Green

The Village Voice

Intimate with ambitions and infidelities, it's very funny, monstrously sad, and amazingly vivid. Any Human Heart, for all its titular generality, is that rare thing: a book so good that one foolishly hopes -- as one does with life -- it will never end.

The New Yorker

Couched as the diary of one Logan Mountstuart -- writer, seducer, spy, and all-around charlatan - Boyd's novel attempts a panorama of twentieth-century history with its hero constantly at the edge of the frame. Mountstuart dines with Bloomsburyites, meets Joyce in Paris, spends the Spanish Civil War hobnobbing with Hemingway and the Second World War trailing the Duke of Windsor for British Intelligence. Later, he runs an art gallery in New York, and gets mixed up in the Nigerian civil war and with the Baader-Meinhof gang. Such an antic plot should not succeed, and yet disbelief remains suspended, thanks to Boyd's skill in producing a novel that successfully mimics a diary in all its human pettiness. He allows Mountstuart's voice to age like port: the precocious schoolboy blithely speculates that the "announcement of a future fact has a tenuous hold on the present moment," while the adult reflects, "It's always hard trying to imagine the loss of something you never had."

Book Magazine - Paul Evans

A madcap wonder of a tale, this novel offers the journals of adventurer and spy Logan Mountstuart. Boyd's protagonist is a Zelig figure who lives the life of the century￯﾿ﾽstarting out in Latin America in 1906, he whirlwinds through Oxford, then joins Pablo Picasso in Paris in the '20s. Next, he's a war correspondent in the Spanish civil war. In World War II, he becomes a naval intelligence operative, hot on the trail of an elaborate murder mystery (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are involved. In dizzying succession, he then plunges into the world of abstract expressionist painting in New York, trailblazes Africa and tangles with German terrorists in London. Boyd's previous fiction￯﾿ﾽespecially his Hollywood novels (The New Confessions, The Blue Afternoon￯﾿ﾽhas been brilliantly inventive. This may be his most cunning yet.

Publishers Weekly