
Any Human Heart
Reviews


Any Human Heart is fictional journal that feels very real. There’s an unidentified editor who plugs in footnotes and other notes such as why there might be gaps in the timeline, or what was happening with Logan’s family or the books that he had written. The footnotes mostly identify the actual writer, or historian, or wartime event, or city, or artist our man, Logan Mountstuart, happens to mention in his account of his life. All the footnotes that I checked are accurate. It’s very easy to be swept up in a feeling that you are being allowed to read someone’s personal journal rather than just a fictional depiction of one. We’re taken from 1923 until his death in 1991 and the reader experiences, through Logan’s memories, his rollercoaster life of intense love, lust and loss as well as the many changes that happened during this portion of the 20th century. This man, (and even though I know that it’s really Boyd who has created this character – he still feels real to me) who is not a perfect man, but who knows his faults, knows his weaknesses, and sometimes overlooks his strengths, reveals his life in a very compelling fashion. This is a delight to read.

I got about half way through and wondered why I was making other books I really wanted to read wait while I trudged on through page after page of what seemed a fairly average story. I wasn't engaged in the characters, and must have missed it if there was a plot; so i decided to put it down.





















Highlights

That's all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula.


Well, look at me, I said, beginning to list my misfortunes. Who gives a shit about you? she said. You'll be fine, you always have been. It's me I'm worried about.

Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize - quite rationally, quite unemotionally - that the world in the not-so-far-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.

Why do politicians love uniforms? - all these funny little men in Europe in their pantomime costumes.

Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.) Is it possible to live reasonably without lying? Do lies form the natural foundation of all human relationships, the thread that stitches our individual selves together?

The Christmas tree must surely be the saddest and most vulgar object invented by mankind.

Are there aspects of our lives things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record?
Yes.