Book Review: The Brothers Boswell

Published on Wednesday 18 August 2010 14:53

THE BROTHERS BOSWELL BY PHILIP BARUTH Corvus, 352pp, £12.99

A fiction set in 18th century Edinburgh and London, featuring two of that era's literary lions - James Boswell and the man whose Life he wrote, the famously brusque and opinionated Dr Samuel Johnson - and written by an American: the heart sinks.

Unfairly, as it turns out. Philip Baruth, a specialist in 18th century literature, has spent time getting to know Edinburgh's closes and wynds yet wears his research lightly. The odd period slang exchange aside, he avoids the temptation to show off.

And he's no mean storyteller. The world he evokes in what is billed as a literary thriller is so richly drawn you can feel the lice crawl. The mudlark making a living catching flotsam in the (very muddy) Thames is about the most salvageable person you'll meet; you want to shout out to him to stop putting his head under in that filthy tidal flow. As for the others, they're busy with illicit fumblings in public parks and back alleys, ingratiating themselves or holding forth at shallow society parties and in coffee houses, hanging around stage doors, making ostentatious peregrinations and, in James Boswell's case, coping with an unwelcome case of the clap after an assignation with the actress of his dreams. The mood is dark, the characters flawed to the point of unpleasantness - but gradually this grimy world, partly seen in flashback, has you gripped.

Baruth has set himself an interesting challenge in telling the story of the twentysomething Boswell's year in London in 1762-63 - a time when he was prepared to do anything to get in with the elite - through the eyes of his younger brother, John, a man who hardly gets a mention in the famous journal. The premise is that John, who is known to have suffered from melancholia, is recently discharged from a hospital for the insane in Plymouth (full-blown madness runs in the family) and has come to the capital to track his brother down and force an introduction to his new friend Dr Johnson. A jealous obsessive in possession of two gold pistols: John is a man to be taken seriously, it seems.

The action takes place on one day, Saturday 30 July 1763 - a day whose entry in Boswell's diary mentions simply a trip down the Thames to Greenwich in company with the great man (he has known Johnson barely two months). In Baruth's telling, mad John is on their tail, seething with injustice at being left out of the party and plotting an unpleasant surprise. You'd need to be the mad, ignored younger sibling of someone famous to understand his need to brandish a firearm.

The plot is foiled when Boswell and Johnson turn back without exploring a crypt where John lies in wait (he is left alone in the dark); but he soon tracks them down again, eventually ambushing them at a hostelry in the evening. From this point on the pulse quickens and you are in full-blown thriller territory, complete with a table-turning set piece and a nightmarish stagger along the Thames to an empty warehouse - and the dawning realisation that you probably shouldn't believe a word mad John says.

Yet his early flashbacks are compelling. For all his supposed mental unbalance, he is a perceptive narrator with a flair for language and even witty - the few light moments in the novel are his. The accounts of his Edinburgh childhood, as the second son of a respected judge, are lucidly and vividly done. It's through him that we learn why Johnson is such a catch for his older brother James: the two have worshipped the compiler of the Dictionary from afar, even devising a game based on Johnson's more obscure entries.

So are we supposed to see John's talent and sympathise at a madness brought on by languishing in obscurity? Are we simply to register that he, like his brother, is a well-educated young man with a love of words? Are we to detect his latent insanity in what he writes? Or are we to see Baruth's hand in the telling? John seemed to this reader a perfectly sane early authority - and I'm not sure he should have done.

His voice alternates in the novel with an account of James's life in London told in the third person. It keeps its distance, and in doing so makes you care less when John turns up with wild tales of his own secret affair with the Dictionary compiler.

I'm afraid I didn't buy the mad, talented sibling plot, for all its cleverness. Baruth's picture of 18th-century society was the real, if hellish, thrill of this book.