Any Human Heart - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Richard Eder, praised Any Human Heart in the New York Times, "William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks." Christopher Tayler, in the London Review of Books, called the characterisation of Mountstuart weak and wondered if he was merely a device through which Boyd could write pastiche about 20th century writers, "Boyd hustles you through to the end despite all this, but it’s hard not to wonder if it was really worth making the journey." In The Atlantic Monthly, Brooke Allen liked the Mountstuart character: "he is far more generous, forgiving, and free than most of us. He is also more amusing, and more amused by life", thus making an "attractive central character" and Boyd's writing showed "a great natural vitality and an increasingly sophisticated humanism." The Atlantic Monthly selected it as one of the "books of the year".

In The Observer, Tim Adams complimented the opening sections as "nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student." but criticised the "predictability" of Mountstuart's "walk-on part in literary history" and ultimately the suspension of disbelief, particularly the Baader-Meinhoff passages, concluding "For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion." Tom Cox, in The Daily Telegraph disagreed, he praised the characterisation, calling Mountstuart "a man whose fragile egotism and loose-fitting story has you frequently forgetting you're reading fiction, and even more frequently forgetting you're reading at all." Giles Foden, in The Guardian, found the New York art-scene sections weakest, saying they "puncture the realism Boyd has so carefully built up in the rest of the novel." Michiko Kakutani agreed that Mountstuart's youth was well evoked, but that the description of his retirement and poverty was "as carefully observed and emotionally resonant". While in the early part of the book, "the characters' marionette strings carefully hidden" later Boyd tried to play God, resulting in "an increasingly contrived narrative that begins to strain our credulity."

Boyd, who spends his summer in the south of France, has a large audience in that country and several French journals noted the publication of Any Human Heart.L'express called Boyd a "magician", while Le Nouvel Observateur called it "very good Boyd. Perhaps even his magnum opus."

The novel was nominated on the longlist of the Man Booker Prize in 2002, and on the shortlist of the Dublin Impac Literary Award in 2004. In 2009, Boyd commented, " didn't get particularly good reviews, yet I've never had so many letters about a novel. It's selling fantastically well seven years on, and we're about to turn it into six hours of telly for Channel 4, so something about that novel gets to readers."