(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 19 April 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Rosie Boycott, any reader is likely to pick up on this mix of real and imagined people.

Boyd suggested fiction can get closer to the truth of history. Do you feel that remark is justified by the book?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Completely justified. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful book. I loved every page of it. I loved the way he kind of takes a speculation about whether the Windsors were involved with Harry in the Bahamas.

It makes you think all the way through. He's a lovely writer.

It reads like an airport novel in that you cannot put it down and at the same time it is full of wonderful bits of human philosophy and thought.

It is very clever. I loved the sense that you got this whole life. So many novels just concentrate on a major week, weekend or moment. The sense of his life; lots of it is incredibly boring, things go wrong and right and he jumps in and out at the right moment.

There's a lovely bit where he says towards the end of his life, "That's all your life amounts to in the end, the aggregate of all the good and bad luck that you experience."

It's very true and you see his life like that. It's a terrific book, he's very, very skilful and I'd recommend it to anybody.

MARK LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, he sets himself a challenge here. If you take an old man, say Anthony Burgess' 'Earthly Powers', told in one voice from the perspective of very old age: but he does it in contemporaneous diaries and has to keep changing voice as the writer ages. Do you think he has brought those shifts off?

TOM PAULIN:
What I got fascinated by here was, it is a bit like Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' or Kazuo Ishiguro's 'When We Were Orphans'.

It is a novel about the writer's life. At a certain stage in the writer's life, middle-age, maybe going into the last phase, the writer looks at really what he feels about himself as a writer.

If you think, we all invent fictional characters for ourselves to figure our deep low self-esteem as writers. Shakespeare creates Falstaff and his voice goes right through the sonnets.

It is a novel about growing up. But there is a late builder of a man for which a supreme example is Dickens' Great Expectations.

Towards the end of his life, he takes his life apart in that and looks at what he feels anxious about, the driven demonic nature of the imagination.

So what Boyd is saying in a very, very honest way is "This is how I feel, like a sort of minor marginal Ian Fleming character, I hope I'm not like that."

But the way Fleming comes in and out of it, it is very interesting. It is a cosmic name- dropper. Also, this is a man who feels a relationship is sex and restaurant meals. There's really nothing else there.

So he's a very empty character. But, as metaphor, as finding an imaginative idea, what it feels like to be a writer, the loneliness of it; this is what he is saying.

RACHEL HOLMES:
As Rosie says, it is a novel of philosophy. It is philosophical. It asks us is it possible to live reasonably without telling lies.

The genius of it is that he reminds us that we might go to the diary form or indeed the biography and autobiography and expect the truth about people and historical figures and how they put themselves in...

MARK LAWSON:
Because we never know whether the narrator is lying here.

RACHEL HOLMES:
We don't know whether the narrator is lying and we also know by the annotations and end notes that actually the narrator himself is being edited by a silent figure who one could therefore take to be the protagonist.

The achievement of this novel is that by writing it through a diary that is also annotated and end noted, we end up believing that Logan Mount Stewart existed as a real historical figure.

TOM PAULIN:
We get fond of him towards the end don't we?

MARK LAWSON:
Curious history, Boyd. He got a Bookers short listing earlier on and ignored for five or six books. Why do you think that is? He has outsold most of his generation.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I think because they are so easy to read, and he is so clever and so subtle in the way that he puts it across to you, that somehow people take him for granted as a writer and good story teller.

I hope that this soars and people say that this is a great book, this is a tremendous book. It is a wonderful history as well of the last century, in fact. You follow it through.

I read it a lot sitting in a tent with a torch. When I turned the torch off at the end, there was a wonderful moment in it that he talked about the war, fracturing people's lives.

I found myself thinking about my father, what happened to my Dad, and how difficult it was. All the way through little echoes of things were coming back to you.

MARK LAWSON:
General view then that you would have hard-hearted not to be find something in William Boyd's 'Any Human Heart' which is out in hardback now.