The title, in testament to the prolific and ever-abundant writing of Costa Award-winning British author William Boyd, comes from an old Chinese saying: “Plant one bamboo shoot — cut bamboo for the rest of your life.” After eight novels, three short stories collections, and 12 screenplays made into films, Bamboo: Essays and Criticism compiles three decades of non-fiction from the sardonic historian of 20th century life and observer of Englishness under pressure. A wide-ranging array of articles, profiles, and reviews are gathered — from Auden to the Wright Brothers, the Sausage Fly to Minicabs — under the six headings of Life, Literature, Art, Africa, Film and Television, and People and Places.

With much of Boyd’s and Bamboo’s Life beginning in Ghana, the author was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, which “was crazy, idiotic, and not at all like I imagined war to be. All my received opinions from books and television turned out to be misguided." And yet, a little borrowing from one classic work evokes the “efforts of hindsight and occasional nostalgia” of that homeland surrealism: a musical madeleine in the tunes of Nat King Cole “proves the most effective Proustian trigger [for] one of my father’s habits when he first got up in the morning almost immediately to put a record on a shiny walnut hi-fi he had shipped out from Britain.”

Of course, re-creating is another good way to re-live an experience, and when Boyd takes on the task of first-time directing on his World War I-set work The Trench, he breezily documents the experience in his favored yet educational and resourceful “squeeze a quart into a pint pot” A-Z formal device. Spotlighting cinematic and historic insights, he feels Anxiety, sensing “the worry in me course through my body like a bacillus, curdling my blood." Blood being "one of the easiest things to arrange on a filmset…” And the gamut goes on...

Indeed, pieces conveying personal experience ring truest throughout Bamboo, from Boyd’s Woody Allen sightings and subsequent sidewalk cinema musings, to the impact of the often overlooked 1973 film Electra Glide in Blue, which changed the way Boyd viewed motion pictures. Boyd also chronicles a trip to Tallapoosa, Georgia, the town that a Wallace Steven’s poem “had conjured up for me — the quintessential hick town, but also magic and potent.” And also, in “Being Translated,” Boyd whimsically recounts encounters and communications, for good or bad, with various translators of his books. His Norwegian translator, for instance, risked being lost in translation when he ended a letter with an any-major-dude-speak “Hey listen, man, if you’re ever in Oslo and short of bread you can crash in my pad anytime.”

Bamboo shoots grow wildest within the Literature section, covering ground that includes William Golding, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, W.H. Auden, Milan Kundera, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michael Ondaatje, and many more. The advantage to having these essays and reviews anthologized together is getting the opportunity to better square away, say, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and Anton Chekhov to the critical history laid out in “The Short Story” essay. Or to be presented with the philosophic mix-and-match that comes, for example, with the varying interpretive approaches to Camus, who had a belief in faith, if not the traditional kind of faith: “What interests me is knowing how we should behave when one does not believe in God or reason.” This comprises, says Boyd, the “universal element” in Camus’ work that will make it endure. On the other hand, Flaubert was more limited in his allowances and, as Boyd asserts, “When he quoted Voltaire’s dictum that ‘the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity,’ he meant it from the bottom of his heart.”