William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

C. Camus

Is Albert Camus the most famous French writer in the United Kingdom? I think it very likely — though he is run a close second by Gustave Flaubert. The reason is, I think, that almost everyone studies L’Etranger at school and the novel continues to haunt its readers long after the need to study it has gone. It remains enduringly modern in spirit. As does its author. Camus seems a prototypical French writer: handsome, engagé, moody, intellectual, sexy. And he liked football. Of course, like all those who die young his image is fixed in time, unchangingly. A friend of mine used to see him at parties at Gallimard in the 1950s—“always surrounded by pretty girls.”

D. Dordogne

When people ask me where I live in France I always hesitate to say “the Dordogne” because I realize it is so associated with the British. In fact I know hardly any British people in the area — almost all our friends and neighbours are French. But at the same time I am very conscious that this part of France has a powerful and curious draw for my fellow countrymen and women. I love it as much as they do, I suspect, but why do I not want to be too closely associated with these new colonialists?

E. Eurostar

There are, reputedly, some 200,000 French people living in and around London and the Eurostar link brings tens of thousands more each weekend. Sometimes when I walk up the King’s Road in Chelsea, where I live, I hear nothing but French voices. My impression is that the French love London and indeed that “London” represents “Britain” for most of them: they do not voyage further afield. This is not true the other way round. The British range throughout France, many of them choosing to avoid Paris.

F. France

There is an idea of France that exists in the minds of the British that is a fantasy. It is impossible for any country to live up to an ideal that is so persistent and so prevalent. No doubt there is an equivalent French fantasy about the British. Le style anglais, for example, is a very French concept. Or let’s say a very French evaluation of a form of unreflective Englishness. I have a French friend who dresses in a way he imagines is appropriate for an English gentleman — tweed jacket, striped tie, brogues, a certain type of haircut. In fact he looks very elegant and completely French — not remotely like an English gentleman.

But the British dream of France is more complex and I think more profound. It’s not just a question of attitudes, values and fashion styles. It is this dream of France that sends the British there year after year, decade after decade. At its essence, I feel sure, is the conviction that, of all the countries on earth, the French have solved the problem of the quality of life, of how to live well.

G. Good Manners

I have to say that after some eleven years of living in France the welcome we have received from our neighbours, the tradesmen and the people we deal with on a day to day basis has been both warm and unaffected. I often wonder if, say, I was a Frenchman living in the English or Scottish countryside would the welcome I’d receive there measure up in the cordiality stakes. I have a strong feeling we would suffer in comparison. You see something of the difference in the small formalities of everyday behaviour that are commonplace in France but are still somewhat baffling to the English. The handshake, the kissing, the salutations on parting—“Bonne continuation,” “Bon fin de l’après midi”—the Messieurs-Dames acknowledgement as one enters a crowded shop. This quotidian politesse is very marked — but we British notice it because it is lacking in our own daily lives.

H. Hunting

Many of our French friends and neighbours in France are avid hunters. The most ardent kill migrating doves in October, luring them to feed on acorns and then shooting them from palombières, extravagant firing-platforms cum tree-houses in the oak woods that surround our house. Our local palombière is a deluxe version fitted out with a kitchen and a dining room some twenty metres above the forest floor. Hunting in France is classless, it seems to me — insofar that it’s for everyone: rich and poor. Hunting in Britain is steeped in class: it’s designed to be socially exclusive. Perhaps no one concept better illustrates the divide between the two countries. A book could be written on it.

I. Immensity

My English life is lived in the south-east of England, the most densely populated place in Europe. By contrast in France, even in the height of summer, I often feel isolated, a solitary presence. You forget how big France is compared to Britain — how easy it is to find yourself in an unpeopled landscape. One August, driving back from the Côte d’Azur we were caught up in a massive traffic jam on the autoroute. We decided to take the backroads home — the C and D roads — and drove across the Hérault and the Aveyron in the general direction of Cahors and then on westwards to the Dordogne. I had an impression of great tracts of emptiness, with a few signs of cultivation and the odd ancient village. It took a full day to make our journey home but when I looked at a map of France to see the way we had come it didn’t seem that great a distance — just the crossing of a corner of the hexagon. You can, of course, find a similar sense of remoteness in Britain but you have to go looking for it. In our case we just turned off the motorway from the broiling hell of the Mediterranean holiday traffic and there it was — and we followed the minor, single-track roads through a virtually untouched wilderness.

J. July

23 July 1993 to be precise: this is the moment when I date the beginning of my French life. This was the first night that we spent in the old farmhouse we had bought and renovated on the Monbazillac plateau, south of Bergerac. We had bought the house two years previously, spontaneously, not really able to afford it but captivated by its perfect location. It’s a solid, thick-walled farmhouse with a large stone barn, surrounded by woods, set on a hill overlooking a quiet valley, with a winding drive one kilometre long. It answered all our wishful dreams about the kind of house we imagined living in.

Having bought it and having planned to do it up piecemeal — room by room, as we could afford it — we were then visited by one of those strokes of luck that everyone needs from time to time. In 1994, the following year, a film was made based on my novel, A Good Man in Africa, and suddenly our cash-flow problems were eased and we were able to instruct the builders to go full steam ahead. I looked on this as a good omen, not just because it linked my old African life with my new one in France but because Sean Connery had agreed to play the role of the Scottish doctor, “Doctor Murray,” one of the two “Good Men” in Africa that the title alludes to. “Doctor Murray,” moreover, is a portrait of my father — who died in 1978. I took all these auspicious biographical congruencies to be a form of blessing on this new French life we were embarking on — a choice that has never prompted a moment’s regret ever since.

K. King’s Road

Our life in France is largely rural; our nearest town of any size is Bergerac. Occasionally we will visit Périgueux. Such a tranquil life has mixed blessings for a writer: there is plenty of uninterrupted time for the imagination to work but there is an absence, nonetheless, as the weeks roll by, of the stimulation of the passing parade. You cannot be a novelist without being a compulsive observer of your fellow human beings and I find myself, for example, as the summer wears on and July gives way to August, hankering for London, for Chelsea, for the King’s Road. The King’s Road is not as bohemian as it used to be but I spend a good portion of each day, when I am in London, wandering up and down it. It never fails to deliver something surprising, strange, beguiling, intriguing. If I want to witness the full gamut of human types the world has to offer the King’s Road has them in abundance.