Published 2002 / Length 504 pages
Logan Mountstuart begins writing a private journal while still a seventeen-year-old schoolboy and continues it through other key phases of his varied and colourful life: as an Oxbridge student; then as a writer in 1930s London, meeting the rich and famous; through to his last years as a would-be recluse in rural France. In between, he is betrayed as a spy in the Second World War, enjoys the high life as a New York art dealer, and teaches English Literature at a university in Africa. Boyd captures both the tone of the man at different life stages and the mood of each historical period so convincingly that one feels genuine emotion for the fictional diarist. It is a book filled with love and war; success and tragedy; gains and losses in many forms. Throughout, Logan maintains his urge for adventure and a lifelong capacity for misjudgement. Any Human Heart is a riveting and inspiring ride through one man’s life, taking in the changing landscape of the twentieth century along the way.
‘Finishing this, I started to think seriously about my pension – even though I’m thirty years away from retiring. I was so galvanized, following this man’s life. Just amazing. I cried after the epilogue, as if I knew him. Very odd.’ – SIMEON, 38
• In Mountstuart’s ‘Preamble’ he writes that we ‘keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us’. How, and how well, is this achieved in the journals that follow?
• Mountstuart accounts for his life and feelings in the present tense, sometimes in the heat of the moment. What are the implications of this? What might be different about a memoir looking back and reconstructing the material?
• How well does Boyd conjure up key trends in the almost-century spanned by the story?
• Reading these diaries, did you start to relate to Logan Mountstuart as you might an actual diarist – is Boyd successful here at the novelistic trick of suspending readers’ disbelief?
• ‘The view ahead is empty and void: only the view backward shows you how utterly random and chance-driven [life’s] vital connections are.’ Discuss, in light of both Mountstuart’s experiences and Boyd’s choice of narrative structure.
• Boyd introduced Logan Mountstuart in an earlier work, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960. Published in 1998, this ‘biography’ reportedly fooled several art critics, who expressed views on (the fictional) Nat Tate.
• Any Human Heart was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.
• Boyd was appointed a CBE for services to literature in 2005.
• My Century by GÜNTER GRASS – a collection of stories set in Germany and spanning the twentieth century, in a series of narrative voices that include the autobiographical.
• Oracle Night by PAUL AUSTER – a moving portrayal of a writer’s meanderings during his recovery from a near-fatal illness, with some literary playfulness thrown in for good measure.