Any Human Heart: an off-the-pile review
Voice and humour carried me through this 20th-century-spanning life story
I recently had an interesting conversation with a colleague about our struggles to clearly visualise things in our heads, and how this affects both our reading and writing. Lately, there have been a lot of articles and social media posts about this inability to picture things clearly with the mind’s eye, a phenomenon called aphantasia. Many posts ask how you respond to the ‘apple test’, which entails trying to conjure the image of a red apple in your mind’s eye. People’s capability to do so tends to fall on a spectrum ranging from being able to genuinely see nothing, to fuzzy outlines of the fruit, to a full-on 3D photorealistic image. I probably fall somewhere just a bit to the right of seeing nothing, in that I get a vague sense of an apple. I can visualise things, but they tend to be based on things I have already seen (in real life or in pictures/visual media). Maybe I just deal in Platonic ideals—the basic version of an apple, or a chair, or a beach, or whatever it is. If it’s an abstract concept, the word will do. I am a highly verbal thinker. And, no, I can’t draw.
What does all this mean for my reading? And why did this conversation resonate when I was reading William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart? The bottom line is, I find it hard to follow dense descriptions sometimes, especially of landscapes and background scenes. I have a good sense of what characters are like, not through superficial descriptions of their appearance (I honestly don’t think I’d be much use if I had to give an accurate description of someone to the police as a witness…), but through their feelings, motivations and interactions with other characters and their environment. Interiority is pretty important, and that’s why I love novels. I also love dialogue, and narrative voice can make or break a book for me. Some of my favourite books ever have had something distinctive about the narrative voice that has carried me through the story. The voice in my head provides its own audiobook of what I’m reading on paper, in a way.
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Any Human Heart is presented as a published collection of the journals of a man called Logan Mountstuart, from his later boarding school days through his adult life, which is mainly spent as a writer with varying degrees of success, to his death. His life spans much of the twentieth century, so it also plays on the idea of how one ‘ordinary’ person can interact with big events, like World War II, and people who turn out to be important or famous, mainly artists like Picasso and Pollock in this case. Comparisons to the eponymous film character Forrest Gump, who turns up in the background of various historical events, have been made.
While the plot was nothing special, dealing mostly with the ins and outs, ups and downs of a long life in the personal and professional spheres, the journal format and the voice that Boyd created for Logan Mountstuart really carried the book for me. To my verbal, not-so-visual mind it was like him narrating his own life story with all his colourful vignettes and opinions on the events and people of his life. What Boyd did really well was create a gap between reality and Logan’s understanding or reading of it that the discerning reader could perceive but he could not. He thought he was being sent by the Admiralty to the Caribbean during World War II because of his ability, whereas as readers we suspect it’s because they didn’t know what else to do with him and they needed him out of the way. This disconnect is what created a lot of the humour in the book, and the humanity. Perhaps Logan’s biggest flaw is an over-inflated sense of his own importance and ego, and a tendency to dismiss the opinions and efforts of others. On the more gimmicky side, this is seen in the way, during Logan’s spell as a buyer for an art gallery in New York, he dismisses the works of the likes of Jackson Pollock, who we know from history came to be widely revered. It is also seen in the way he talks about the literary career of his schoolfriend Peter Scabius. Both Logan and Peter end up trying to making a living from writing, but while Peter is successful (certainly in terms of book sales and continued published output), Logan’s own literary career peters out and he ends up nearly destitute as an older man. And yet, Logan snobbishly dismisses, or only briefly mentions, Peter’s books each time they come out. The reality is [spoiler ahead at the end of this paragraph!], that Peter Scabius is successful and well-known enough to warrant an obituary in the newspapers when he dies, whereas the last line of Any Human Heart states that following Logan’s death ‘There were no obituaries'.’ What a quietly devastating last line!
Another upshot of my (mild?) aphantasia is that I usually enjoy tv or film adaptations of books. While some people get annoyed when the character portrayed on screen doesn’t look like the image they had in their head, I’m grateful for a mental image to attach to the character name that I might not have been able to produce myself. As long as the character portrayal is roughly in the right ballpark, I’ll go along with it. Let’s be honest, I could not have read many Song of Ice and Fire books without first having seen the Game of Thrones tv series and having some placeholder image for all the many characters who would have got confused in my mind otherwise. The same can probably be said for settings, costumes, key props. These give clarity to what would otherwise exist in my imagination as vibes only.
With that in mind, I looked up the 2010 tv adaptation of Any Human Heart and thought it had a wonderful cast. I think it was a great decision to cast Jim Broadbent as Logan Mountstuart in his later years, during which he comes across as a grumpy and deluded but essentially harmless old man still looking for human connection. I can see it, to the best of my semi-aphantasiac ability anyway.