title: The Romantic by: Boyd, William published: 2022 read: 2023-06 preview

A fictitious history novel describing the life of Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), an adventurer who joins the luscious society of Shelley and Byron; discovers the source of the Nile; is a soldier in India; owns a farm and introduces lager in Massachusetts; is a best-selling author and ends up in jail for fraud; is the bastard son of a count or earl, and lives good by that; is involved in smuggling antiques from Egypt; but in reality all his life tries to reconnect with his eternal love, Countess Raphaelle Rezzo. A long, rich, fulfilling life, after which one gets the feeling, that’s a life worth living!

The book opens with Cashel already thinking he’s met his end:

Cashel always claimed that his first memory was of a man in black, leading a black horse. A man who – he then suspected – wanted to kill him, for some reason. This occurred when he was about four or five or six years old (he would vaguely recall) and the encounter took place when he was mooching around late one wintry afternoon in the big copse behind the cottage where he lived in County Cork, Ireland. He heard distant hunting horns and snatched halloos from the fields beyond and then, closer to hand at the fringes of the copse, out of sight, came a thrashing and snapping of vegetation, of something sizeable pushing and forcing its way through the undergrowth.

A wildly entertaining story, and that is almost all what matters in this book. And totally irrelevant.

Ross dies, alone, in a train station, after just having left countess Rezzo:

It was Ignatz Vlac who tracked Cashel down. Before quitting Baden-Baden, Cashel had telegraphed, as promised, to say he was leaving and hoped to be in Venice within the next twenty-four hours or so. He gave no details about which route he would take. There was no need to be met at the station, he instructed.

And thus ended a life, active to the last minute. One can only be jealous. But perhaps more of the author: a superbly told story, and a great read.