William Boyd's not generally thought of as a reckless person. He says himself he isn't an 'intrepid' man, but cautious and measured, prudent and determined. His career as a novelist has been one of distinctive but unflamboyant success, hard work stepping him up the literary ranks.
His writing style is quiet and intelligent, sometimes workaday - not for him the all-or-nothing razzle-dazzle of a Martin Amis, whose every sentence bears his distinctive logo, but storytelling and characters in a safe pair of hands. And the self he presents in public is similarly genial, assured, generous and modest. I meet him in a café off the King's Road and we sit in a booth drinking coffee. He is easy to talk to, welcoming. With his large and sprawling handsomeness, his self-deprecating and diffident charm, he isn't thunder and lightning, but a temperate clime.
Yet there are certain intriguing contradictions about Boyd, for if his prose style is ordered and calm and his public persona is self-effacing and nice, he seems increasingly drawn, in his work, to the monstrous and the strange: that which can't be easily understood, the sickening lurches of fate behind life's pleasant façades. There's a real disquiet behind his well-mannered style.
And his latest venture is intrepid, and has about it a certain valour and recklessness. He has written and directed his first film, The Trench. It is a project that was self-generated (he thought up the idea, wrote the script, and only then set about finding the funding), and although it is set in the First World War, it is not the adventure story one might have expected from Boyd, whose novels have often been ones of narrative excitement, the best of boy's own. The bleak and moving film is set in the 48 hours that led up to the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which 60,000 British soldiers were killed in the first days. A handful of very young men - boys really, in their late teens, fresh-faced and eager - wait for the order to clamber out of the trench and into the green Somme meadows where death will scatter them.
THe entire film is set in the trench - eight feet deep and four feet wide, squalid and claustrophobic. There is little obvious narrative, just a handful of volunteers, squabbling and remembering, defecating and dreaming, in their warren together. Sweet boys straining to be men. (The actors Boyd chose to play the volunteers are in their late teens and early twenties; their faces shine with youth.)
For the first few minutes of the film one longs for blue sky and large spaces; then gradually the trench becomes normality and safety. It becomes the strange home of the young men; the unlit world into which all their cultures, memories and hopes are brought - and then, as they go over the top, smashed. An American woman wailed at Boyd during a showing of the film at the Edinburgh festival: 'What are you trying to do to us?' Boyd smiles when he remembers her. 'Well, you're not meant to think at the end of the film, "That wasn't too bad, after all." It's meant to disturb and shake you up. I've seen it about 75 times now, and it still shakes me. There are parts where the actors are acting with such feeling that they are almost not acting any more. Their emotions are so intense; the scenes are so charged.'
Boyd had uncles who fought in the Second World War and a grandfather who fought in the First World War. He grew up hearing stories about the war, reading comics about war, seeing films about war, playing at soldiers with his friends, believing the tales of heroism and glory. Then, when he was in his late teens and living with his family in Nigeria, the civil war broke out 'and it was one of my defining moments. There were roadblocks, cars were stopped, people were pointing guns at you, there were armed soldiers everywhere. I realised then there was a very thin line between order and chaos. I realised: this is what it's like then. Not Kelly's Heroes or The Longest Day or Reach for the Sky. It's a wretched Nigerian boy soldier in a baseball cap and combat fatigues ordering you out of the car. It's as random and unglamorous as that.'
When he thought about directing his own film, he knew it would be about the First World War, a time where the 'artist's imagination comes up against a wall; encounters the muted and monochrome version of it. I wanted to re-imagine it for myself. I wanted to see if that was possible.'
Boyd's decision to stay entirely in the trench for the duration of the film (only in the last few minutes do the soldiers clamber out, running towards a blue horizon to their freeze-frame deaths) was entirely pragmatic - he was constrained by money. His budget was £2.5 million, a lot to find when the director is untried and there are no big name actors, but a tiny amount compared to Hollywood films. 'It would buy Tom Cruise's leg, for a fortnight.'
It was when he thought about Das Boot, the early masterpiece about war set almost entirely in a German U-Boat, that he realised how he could make a virtue out of intense claustrophobia. 'It can be powerful, solid, cinematic.' He believes that he was liberated by the constraints of working within a small budget. 'Hollywood is so very formulaic now and good cinema is flourishing in the independent circuits not in the studio systems. Basically, people want to make sentimental romantic comedies starring Julia Roberts. If you don't fit that round hole, you're a square peg. It's the most depressing time, with scarcely a single maverick spirit to say: what the hell, this is what I want to do.'
He should know. He's not new to the film game; his film scripts include Stars and Bars, A Good Man in Africa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mister Johnson and Chaplin. However, his film ventures have not so far been a great success. Many of the films he scripted have been slammed; many never even made it to celluloid. He has been openly sore about some of his experiences (when writing the script for Diabolique, the studio wanted to change the ending so it would be happy). What makes this film different, Boyd thinks, is that he has control over it. He has not been sucked into a system that he despises and made compromises he regrets.
I've served a 16-year apprenticeship. I know the industrial process. Nevertheless, it's quite scary, that first day and you're in charge and you have a crew of a hundred and you've no idea what they're going to make of you. I was apprehensive and excited, nervous and confident.' He smiles - a modest smile crinkling his tanned, soft, freckled face - and adds: 'But I have to say it has been a very happy experience. Fantastic.'
For Boyd, after the long-distance solitude of novel-writing, film-making provides a camaraderie he relishes. He likes the constraints, the compromises, the boundaries and the negotiations. 'Budgets, length, point of view: films are all about parameters. In contrast, writing fiction is absolute freedom. As an art form it is so boundlessly generous. Novels literally have no boundaries. You can write a 2,000-page novel covering billions of years, if that's what you decide you want to do. Anything is possible. I'll do films again, but now I am going to go away and write a novel. That's what my life is about - trying to keep true to the youthful ambition I had to be a writer, trying to keep this show on the road. And it is just me.'
The show, for William Boyd, began when he was in his mid-twenties and a lecturer at St Hilda's, Oxford. He wrote A Good Man in Africa, then - at a steadyish rate of a book every three years, with the scripts for films produced between the fiction - An Ice-cream War, Stars and Bars, The New Confessions, The Blue Afternoon, Brazzaville Beach, and, most recently, Armadillo. There has also been the curious fake monograph about the life of the forgotten (actually fictional) artist Nat Tate, which fooled the glitterati of New York, and which emphasises Boyd's taste for satire, his grown-up sharpness hidden away under the nicely boyish face.
Boyd says: 'You are shaped as a writer until that time you consciously decide to be a writer. Once you say, yes, I will be a novelist, every experience is filtered, not raw. What is shame like? Everyone experiences shame. I look to my preconscious self for shame, jealousy, whatever.'
This preconscious life was lived in Africa (Boyd is Scottish, but he grew up in Ghana and Nigeria, where his father worked as a doctor) and at boarding school. Africa, he says, haunts his imagination and dominates many of his books (his earlier novels are Waugh-ish comedies about hapless Englishmen abroad). When he was 11, he was sent to board at Gordonstoun, in the north of Scotland, 'where I was brainwashed. I wasn't dreadfully unhappy or homesick. I accepted it because in the Sixties it was normal if you lived abroad. I was one of the lucky ones. I adapted. I was head of house. I was sporty. I wrote a TV play called Good and Bad at Games: I was one of those who were good at games - but I know what happens if you're bad. It's hell.'
He's written candidly about the experience of being shut up for months on end with hundreds of other pubescent boys, and no one who cares about you at the end of each day: the drinking and bullying and frenetic masturbation; the unreal horror of it all; the strange attitudes bred in whole groups of men towards women. 'Unlike a lot of people, I never went into therapy about it. I'm my own best therapist. I've interrogated myself and I've addressed it in my writing.'
Boyd speaks as someone who came through relatively unscathed, and to many, he presents himself as someone without grave scars, although he points out that he is a private man who decided early on that there were some matters he would not discuss in public. He has written seven major novels, which have all been successful, critically and financially, here and abroad. He has been 'very happily' married since his early twenties to Susan Boyd, editor-at-large for Marie-Claire. All of his books are dedicated to her.
They have no children, but when I ask him about this, asking if this was choice or fate, his open face closes. He looks at me steadily and says: 'That is one of those things that I will not talk about. Terra incognito .'
Not for him the loud crises about teeth or affairs or literary feuds. It looks a smooth life. 'Well, of course, the view back always looks smoother than it is. The view back makes sense and the view ahead is random and chaotic. I think of all the forking paths, the roads not taken. I see the path now, but then I didn't. There have been hard times, difficulties, failures, rejection slips, doubts. I had to work hard.'
'Now,' he says, 'I am at a midpoint in my career. I don't think I will have a mid-life crisis. I am happy with my life; I've been married to the right woman for a long time. I think you can refuse things. Close that door, don't have that problem. You can always say no.
'When I look at my work, I think: I've written so many novels, and I'll probably double that, and that's my oeuvre. That's it. Oh my God, that's it. It's not a sad thought, but I'm advancing through my forties and I have a sense of the long haul of the novelist's career. I'll be 50 in 2002. I've got, say, 30 more years, which is about 10 more novels. Nice round figure: Jane Austen wrote seven, E.M. Forster managed six. Then I think: Will, you should be so lucky. You could get run over by a bus tomorrow. One of the things I've always been acutely conscious of, and written about in each of my novels in one form or another, is luck. I'm too aware of the random and chaotic nature of life to be long term in my plans.'
He tells me about his father, who died after a long and lingering illness when Boyd was in his mid-twenties, and hadn't yet made it as a writer. 'At the time, I just had this sense of personal grief. It took a long while for everyone to pull together again. I was 24, 25, broke, still a student, with three published short stories. It was a trauma which hit me, a rough time. That was 20 odd years ago. He would have been 79 now, which isn't so very old. What his death made me realise is how terribly fragile and terribly precious life is, and that was something I didn't realise until my mid-twenties and I wish I didn't have to realise it then. How everything can fall apart. We are all walking on thin ice. It can crack any time. That can be empowering - you have to relish the present, do things now.'
Now for him, he says, means writing his next novel, which will be longer than usual - it will track a life and cover a century. From 48 hours to a hundred years, because that's what writing brings: 'Freedom to do what you want, the sense that everything is possible.' And because William Boyd is a man who has had great luck in his life.
