William Boyd's Trio: London film setting, swinging 60s, sex and drugs

British writer William Boyd. Photo / Supplied

Trio
by William Boyd
(Viking, $37)
Reviewed by David Herkt

A film is being shot in seaside Brighton in the summer of 1968, that year of global convulsion with its political assassinations, street riots and rebellion. William Boyd's new novel, Trio, uses the intensity of those emotions as the backdrop for a story with a seedier, somehow very British, edge. It's a carefully plotted novel of the intersection of individual human lives and greater social currents.

Boyd is the author of 15 other books and is a well-awarded screenwriter. Trio plays to his strengths and it is a vivid evocation of a moment in British film-making. London's swinging 60s enters its collapse. Music moves from pop to rock. Drugs and sexual liberation open up new and edgier perspectives.

Boyd's central trio consists of Talbot Kydd, a movie producer in the process of coming out as gay after a lifetime of heterosexuality, Elfrida Wing, an alcoholic and creatively blocked novelist married to a film-director and Anny Viklund, a young Swedish/American actress with a penchant for pills and a face for the times. Secret worlds conflict with public persona. They are all vivid characters, impressively drawn, and vastly engaging.

Movie-making is an often-used setting but Trio vividly evokes its barely controlled chaos and insistent under-currents, both financial and personal. Boyd's central cast members are all performers in some way, from the professional to the personally duplicitous, yet reality cannot be avoided. This is the essence of the novel's drama – and its occasional humour.

Trio, by William Boyd. Photo / Supplied

While Boyd draws his three central characters vividly, the novel is packed with an equally effective second tier. Former pop star-turned-actor, the always tumescent Troy Blaze, features alongside a would-be American revolutionary, Cornell Weekes. A French philosopher with a fondness for young American film actresses joins an adulterous and craven British film director.

The plot is a harum-scarum mix of threads that almost shouldn't cohere - but they do. The links are one of the novel's secret pleasures. Boyd's characters also develop and grow with circumstance. Like Anny's affair with Troy, so much happens behind the movie's scenes but each chapter has its beat – and its point to make.

Elfrida's sudden interest in the last day of British writer Virginia Woolf's life as a subject for a book, Talbot's gradual entry into an unexplored sexual world represented by a young tradesman and Anny's eventual submission to the forces of the times become the essence of the story. Sometimes Boyd's satirical intent gets the better of him – it is a world he knows only too well – but this is a minor issue.

Trio has a breezy ease to its story-making. Boyd is a mature artist, a fact reflected in every skilful nuance.