William Boyd 

William Boyd: ‘Fantasy is a genre that I cannot abide any more’

The novelist on why he can’t read JRR Tolkien anymore, being hooked on Muriel Spark and obsessed with James Joyce
  
  

William Boyd.
‘I am an obsessive Joycean, as fascinated by the man as by the work’ … William Boyd. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

My earliest reading memory
In west Africa, where I was born in 1952, in Ghana to be precise. Aged about five, reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book in a large-format, copiously illustrated edition.

My favourite book growing up
The Basil Duke Lee stories by F Scott Fitzgerald. They are not well known. I read them in my early teens. They are heavily autobiographical – Fitzgerald was writing about his own adolescence. For the first time, it seemed, a writer spoke directly to me. “Yes,” I thought, “this is exactly how I feel.”

The book that changed me as a teenager
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I read it, utterly rapt, on an overnight flight from London to Lagos where my family was living at the time. It was 1970 and I was 18 years old. I thought it was the most wonderful novel ever written: funny, cruel, absurd – defiantly, brilliantly anti-war. And I was flying into Nigeria’s civil war, the Biafran war. Art and life conjoined.

The book that changed my mind
Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary. Another African book about a young Nigerian clerk working for a district officer in the 1920s. When I was in my teens, growing up in Nigeria, we had a cook called Mr Johnson. That was what drew me to Cary’s masterpiece and it was revelatory in its empathy and honesty. Cary opened my eyes to the Africa I was living in. I later, coincidentally, wrote an introduction to the book and, later still, adapted it for a film directed by Bruce Beresford.

The book that made me want to be a writer
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. The novel is set in Sierra Leone during the second world war – a west African country I had visited, very similar to the two countries I had lived in, Ghana and Nigeria. I read it in my late teens and for the first time I saw how personal experience of a place – its landscape, atmosphere, weather, textures – could be transformed into fiction, into art.

The author I came back to
Muriel Spark. I think I first read her work too young; I couldn’t connect with her clever, oblique spareness, her dry, ironic take on the world. Then I was asked to review A Far Cry from Kensington, many years later. And I was suddenly hooked. I’ve read everything she’s written.

The book I reread
Ulysses by James Joyce. I am an obsessive Joycean, as fascinated by the man as by the work. But I keep going back to Ulysses. I have about eight copies of it for some reason.

The book I could never read again
The Lord of the Rings. I read it aged 12 and was entranced. That is the age to read Tolkien. Fantasy is a genre that I cannot abide any more.

The book I discovered later in life
The Untouchable by John Banville.

The book I am currently reading
The Echoes by Evie Wyld.

My comfort read
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.

• Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd is published by Viking. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

 

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