Trying to make sense of William Boyd's literary career as a whole is no easy task. His dual impulse to write literary fiction and lighter comic novels-comparable, perhaps, to Graham Greene's distinction between his "novels" and "entertainments"-does not necessarily represent a division or a contradiction. Boyd is a literary chameleon; he refuses to be tied down to any particular subgenre of the novel and defends his right to publish new work that differs completely from what his reading public might expect. Nevertheless, certain preoccupations do emerge repeatedly from the Boyd oeuvre-his troubled engagement with World War I, which he identifies as a crisis point in British, European, and world history; a keen interest in the visual media, particularly motion pictures; a fascination with slang and unconventional speech; mathematics as metaphor; and the technology of flight. Boyd's interest in cinema has led him to adapt many of his...