Bamboo | William Boyd | Review by The Spectator

But there are also, unfortunately, many more pieces that should never have made the cut, journalism written at the moment, for the moment, and apparently on the fly. There are sentences that flick back and forth from present to past tense for no apparent reason; ones that shift from first person to impersonal third person and then to second, all within a couple of lines. There are clumsy formulations that Boyd simply could not have written in any of his novels (the American scenes in Martin Chuzzlewit ‘read desperately unfunnily’) and thoughtless repetitions (‘there were rocky stretches with rock pools’). Clichés abound: Chekhov’s mistress Lika Mizinova ‘was the one that got away’, the ‘cynosure of all male eyes’, ‘like no other woman he knew’, she ‘got under his skin’ (and that’s all within two pages). It is a shock therefore to come across the following disapproving sentence in his essay on Evelyn Waugh’s book Labels: ‘Clichés … and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage.’ Ahem.

If Boyd had produced this collection as ‘doggedly’ as his novels, it would be a 320- page book, and this would have been a rave review. As it is, there are enormous pleasures to be had from Bamboo — you just have to be willing to search them out.