I listened to this book as an audiotape, which took fifteen hours and sometimes seemed like a lifetime which, of course, is what the story is about.

Cashel Greville Ross comes from Ireland but travels the world of the 19th century. He starts in Ireland, moves to India, Zanzibar, America, Venice and Trieste and that is just for starters. He is injured at the Battle of Waterloo, meets up with the Romantic poets and argues with Richard Burton about who found the source of the River Nile.

He is married to a first wife, Brid Corcoran, then has a lengthy attachment to an American farmer, Francis Broome, and then meets the love of his life the Contessa Raphaella in Italy. Accidents and events seem to upset the natural flow of all these relationships.

Also, his life is bedevilled by a series of questionable choices with the last one nearly getting him killed and, maybe, the random nature of life is one of the themes of the novel. He also reinvents himself several times and there are some bizarre coincidences along the way.

At the end, he drafts his autobiography and, perhaps, that is what we have been reading all along.

It’s an entertaining read, very well researched and styled in its links to historical reality but it possibly flags slightly in comparison to his other fictional biography, Any Human Heart.