William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart follows the lead of Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers in examining the 20th century through the life of a fictitious author. Only Burgess’ novelist was gay and successful while Boyd’s author, Logan Mountstuart, was a heterosexual failure. Well, failure might be harsh: he never achieved great literary success but muddled along as a writer. His life was more interesting than anything he was able to put to paper.
Any Human Heart has been adapted into a three-part series for “Masterpiece Classics.” The touching drama stars a trio of actors as the protagonist: Sam Clafin plays Mountstuart as a sexually frustrated Oxford student in the 1920s; Matthew Macfayden as the author in his middle years; and Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent as Mountstuart in dotage, sorting through the memories of his life and waiting to die. The television production is arranged in a sequence of flashbacks as the elder Mountstuart reflects over an unsatisfying if seldom dull life. Mountstuart lived in Paris during the 1920s and palled around with Hemmingway; married and divorced an earl’s daughter; covered the Spanish Civil War for an American news agency; worked with Ian Fleming in British Intelligence during World War II and kept tabs on the dubious Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He wrote a couple of books with some resonance in their day; was imprisoned in Switzerland as a spy; worked in the New York art world during its heroic period; dabbled in left wing extremism;and was reduced at one point to subsisting on dog food.
His father left him with the idea that life is nothing more than luck. It’s a dire philosophy offering little hope for finding any meaning in it all. Struck repeatedly by tragedy, Mountstuart is especially haunted by the loves of his life, his second wife and their daughter, killed at the end of World War II by a V2 rocket that slammed into the little girl’s London schoolhouse. For him, the apparent randomness of their death only proved his father’s point. Alas, much of Mountstuart’s luck proved to be bad.
8 p.m., Feb. 13, 20 and 27 on MPTV 36.1.
