"Trio" by William Boyd

This novel is set in 1968 during the making of a movie in Brighton, England. It charts a few weeks in the lives of the three main characters:

• Anny is an American film star, whose ex-husband is on the run from the FBI for terrorism offences, is enjoying a delightfully innocent and purely physical sexual relationship with her co-star, a failing pop singer.
• Elfrida is an alcoholic novelist with writer's block who is married to the film's director.
• Talbot, the film's producer, has a wife and children and a wholly secret flat in London where he is known by another name.

For each of them, their problems multiply until they reach a crisis, at which point each of them finds a different resolution.

It was an interesting story but I found it hard to really empathise with any of the characters. The novel is told from the alternating point of view of the three main characters and, each time, you are inside their heads, feeling what they sense and experiencing their thoughts. But I never felt I was actually inside their heads and I think this was because it was told in the third person and the past tense which kept me at a distance. In film terms it was as if I was watching the actors from a standard camera without any extreme close ups (or any long distance shots). 

It is formally divided into three books entitled Duplicity, Surrender and Escape. I suppose the theme of the book is that all of these characters are trying to locate their true self ... and it is only when you know who you truly are that you can be happy.

Selected quotes:

• "idly watching a rhomboid of sunlight on the maroon carpet turn itself into an isosceles triangle." (Duplicity 2)
• "The world is composed of people who bow their heads and people who don't" (Duplicity 3)
• "Novelists should be - are - the least recognised of minor celebrities, she thought, almost invisible." (Duplicity 5)
• "She didn't particularly like Virginia Woolf's novels. ... She found the novels overwrought and fey." (Duplicity 5)
• "There were two basic types of alcoholics ... 'Benders' were out of control - wholly appetite-driven, consummation was rapid and destructive, swift oblivion was the aim. ... 'Sippers' on the other hand were more discreet and shrewd. They steadily topped themselves up throughout the day n- sipping -aiming to maintain a constant level of potent, satisfying nut - hopefully -unnoticeable inebriation." (Duplicity 20)
• "People are opaque, utterly mysterious. Even those dearest to us are closed books. If you want to now what human beings are like, actually like, if you want to know what's going on in their heads behind those masks we all wear - then read a novel." (Duplicity 28)
• "She saw Lincoln-green Anaglypta wallpaper hung with etchings of historic martial triumphs ... all to do with war and conflict, as if that was what defined a nation rather than its culture." (Surrender 4)
• "It would have been better if the day had been dull with perhaps some intermittent drizzle - the pathetic fallacy had always seemed to her an under-rated literary tool." (Escape 1)
• "As an adult, all the emotions you experienced were unconsciously measured against their adolescent equivalents - and found wanting ... all your adult emotions failed to equal or come close to the intensity of those emotions that you experienced as an adolescent." (Escape 10) I'm not quite sure why he felt the need to more or less repeat himself in this quote.

September 2022; 343 pages

Boyd also wrote An Ice-Cream War (for which he was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1982) and Waiting for Sunrise

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God