Library: William Boyd – Brexit won’t change the way we think about ourselves

Mace | Issue 1 | Culture & Travel, Magazine

From the Archive

The acclaimed author of 15 novels, including Any Human Heart, debates how seismic events make their way into storytelling

When a century comes to an end, it’s a significant tipping point. My most recent novel, Love is Blind, is set during the turn of the century and, interestingly, I’ve never seen much reflection on the shift from 1899-1900. Maybe I’m wrong, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. Chekhov never comments: in all his correspondence, he doesn’t really refer to the century changing.

Perhaps it was because things that had really changed the world had already happened. One thinks of the arrival of the railways in Dickens’s time: Dickens was a coach-and-horses man and then became a railway man. It was analogous to the arrival of the internet or telecommunications. When the calendar changed, it felt like just another year.

I started Love is Blind before the 2016 referendum. The lead character, Brodie Moncur, travels through Europe. It was never conceived as a “referendum novel”. Having said that, I am a passionate Remainer, driven to distraction and frustration by the prospect of Brexit. It seems an act of monstrous folly. I’ve written about it for many European newspapers – Italian, Swiss, Belgian – as if I knew what I was talking about!

My prediction has always been that while Brexit will be a disaster, one thing we Brits are very good at is fudge and compromise. We will be worse off than we were, but it will seem as if nothing much has happened – but I would have preferred the soft-Brexit …

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