The Romantic

Starred review from June 19, 2023
Cast as a true story “discovered” by Boyd (Any Human Heart), this raucous picaresque chronicles an Englishman’s search for fulfilment and his encounters with prominent historical figures. Cashel Greville Ross is raised by an aunt, his parents having drowned shortly after his birth in 1799. He joins the British army as a young man, serves as a drummer at Waterloo, and travels the globe in search of his fortune. In Pisa, he meets Mary Shelley, who introduces him to her poet husband, Percy, and the couple’s good friend Lord Byron. In Africa, he races Richard Francis Burton and John Speke to locate the headwaters of the Nile. After he’s almost court-martialed for disobeying orders in Ceylon, Cashel does a stint in debtor’s prison in England, founds a brewery in America, and becomes an accidental smuggler of Greek antiquities in Trieste. He also falls in love with numerous beautiful women, among them a countess in Ravenna and a free-spirited Bostonian. Whether in describing military life on the far-flung frontiers of the British empire, detailing the financial perils of 19th-century publishing, or backgrounding Cashel’s adventure as Nicaraguan consul to Trieste, this inventively charts the highs and lows of a life extravagantly lived. Once again, Boyd holds the reader spellbound.