What do You think about The New Confessions (2000)?
I found The New Confessionals really engaging in parts but then also found it wandered off and I lost interest in quite a few sections. The style as another reviewer has said is very similar to Any Human Heart, which also uses William Boyd's clever, chatty style to better effect than used in this book.I wouldn't say this is my favourite of Boyd's work, though I still have a lot to read, and as there are lots of his other books to read I don't think I will be recommending it to any but the most completist of Boyd's fans.
—Manda Graham
I sort of feel about this one the reverse of what I felt about Any Human Heart - in AHH the character really annoyed me in his earlier life, but I warmed to him and thought his later life very moving. I this one, I thought the early war experiences and film-making part was suberb, but then there was no light in the later half of the book, everything went wrong, and there was no humour or joy to balance it. Boyd is obviously very interested in writing about whole lives, but in this case I think h
—Oriana Wilmott
I recently reread The New Confessions by William Boyd. This is one of my favorite books, and rereading it is always a pleasure. That can't be said about a lot of books, even ones I liked a lot the first time around. The Baron in the Trees also has that quality, and they have an unusual connection in that each touches on the European Enlightenment.The New Confessions is about a peripatetic English filmmaker whose career reminds one a little of Abel Gance here, Luis Bunuel there, with some D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, and Hollywood 10 thrown in. It is a credit to the imagination that Boyd can contrive a situation that allows an Englishman to inhabit all these roles. (He repeats this feat in Any Human Heart, but The New Confessions is the better book.) The series of unlikely events is far-fetched but basically believable. Rereading it, I find myself cringing at John James Todd's self-destructive inability to compromise. When I first read it, I admired that. That's one thing that makes this book great; the protagonist embodies these characteristics that are bound to strike one differently as one reads it over again.John James Todd is not a monster, but he is careless and thoughtless, and hurts people he shouldn't. He's selfish in a very particular way (though not greedy). He is capable of generosity and even heroism. He's incredibly narcissistic. All these qualities make his life interesting, and the novel proposes that his strengths and weaknesses, his weird up-and-down life story are in the end unimportant; his masterpiece, a film adaptation of Rousseau's Confessions, is what counts. The New Confessions is a ringing endorsement of art. For a nonbelieving lover of beauty like me, it's an inspiring notion.And yet... You read the book because John James Todd's life is so fascinating and moving. And the work of art that is the purpose of his life is, in the end, a fiction. We readers never will see The Confessions film because it doesn't really exist. This is the irony of any book about creating great art. Boyd knows the irony is there and plays with it. I suspect he, like me, is a true believer in art. But he is too smart not to realize the problematic nature of writing fiction about art. This separates The New Confessions from, say, Somerset Maugham's The Moon and the Sixpence, an inferior book with a similar theme.
—Robert W
