Any Human Heart

BEHIND THE BOOK

A Note from the Author on Writing ANY HUMAN HEART

Of all the eight novels I've written Any Human Heart was technically the most challenging. I had decided very early on in the book's conception that it would be written in journal form. The aim behind this decision was to try and reproduce the random nature of an exemplary human life: life in all its excitement and boredom, happiness, tragedy and absurdity. Logan's particular life, as he recounts it in his journal, could stand--therefore--as everyone's life. None of us truly knows what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, let alone next year and we advance forward into the empty void of the future more in hope than expectation. The journal form, of all the literary forms available to the novelist, most accurately replicates this feature of our human lives--lives governed by the twin, haphazard forces of good luck and bad luck.

The key word here is "replicate." The massive difference between Logan Mountstuart's journal in Any Human Heart and the type of intimate journal that you or I would keep is that Logan's journal was written in full and precise knowledge of what was going to happen to him--written by me, that is, the novelist: all-seeing and omniscient. While Logan, my character, of course has no idea what the future holds. The technical challenge for me was to reproduce this innocence about a future life while being in full knowledge of exactly what lay up ahead. As a novelist, I found this was a very hard thing to sustain over the 85 years that Logan experiences. I constantly had to banish my awareness of Logan's several fates and write as if I was living exactly in the present moment as he was. I think it works: readers "live" Logan's life as he does: they simultaneously share his joy and despair, his tedium and his shock--but a lot of unnatural effort went in to making this seem naturally effortless!

-- William Boyd