Genre and Style
The novel is narrated in the first person through a series of nine journaux intimes, kept by the protagonist from age 17 until shortly before his death at 85. French literary journals, always published posthumously, are often extremely candid accounts, particularly of the author's sexual life. Boyd, himself a francophile, includes allusions to masturbation, prostitution and Mountstuart's three marriages. While Boyd had earlier written work in the form of memoir or biography, a journal is different: "For a start, it's written without the benefit of hindsight, so there isn't the same feeling you get when you look back and add shape to a life. There are huge chunks missing." The novel's grounding in everyday life and focus on characterisation place it firmly within realism.
Each journal covers a different period of Mountstuart's life, and they are usually geographically named: The School Journal, London I, etc. Boyd varied the narrator's tone in each to demonstrate changes in Mountstuart's character, in the first London Journal he is, according to Boyd, a "modernist aesthete", becoming a "world-weary cynic" in New York and finding "serene and elegiac serenity" in the final French journal. To support the book's historical themes and documentary premise, there is a feigned editorial apparatus: an index listing real people and their relation to Mountstuart alongside fictional characters, an editor's introduction (by Boyd), an authorial preface (by Mountstuart) and a list of works attributed to Logan Mountstuart. An additional stylistic feature is the anonymous editor, in fact Boyd, who introduces the book and offers explanatory footnotes, cross-references and attempts at dating. Since a journal is written from the perspective of each day, Mountstuart's moods change as events affect him. The form lends itself to "plotlessness", since the author/narrator inevitably cannot see the overall structure of the story. Plot lines which "fizzle and fade" emphasise the theme of multiple selves throughout life. Boyd adds other aspects to the work, such as parenthetical musings that are never answered, to re-enforce the style. His tone of voice gradually changes as he ages, Boyd wanted the style to reflect a major theme i.e. that we change and grow throughout life, "I wanted the literary tone of each journal to reflect this and so the voice subtly changes as you read on: from pretentious school boy to modern young decadent, to bitter realist to drink soaked cynic, to sage and serene octogenarian, and so forth."
Read more about this topic: Any Human Heart
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