WILLIAM BOYD: Sweet Caress
This
is a so much better novel than its soppy title suggests. It’s taken me more than
a month to finish, not because it’s a hard read (au contraire) but because it’s so well written that I wanted to savour
it rather than gulp it down.
Very convincingly penned in the first person female, it’s the 'autobiography' of
Amory Clay, a middle-class girl from south-east England who becomes a
world-class photographer. She will become famous for her war pictures – post-D-Day
France and Vietnam – but she often has to support herself with routine fashion
shoots and wedding assignments. In her mind she will be famous for her lovers –
not too many, but all of them memorable. The man she marries turns out to be,
like her father, psychologically scarred by the horrors of war.
War
and peace and love: perennial themes to which William Boyd, as he has before,
does eloquent justice. Sweet Caress is
illustrated throughout with photos by (and of) Amory, not many of them
creatively outstanding but all extraordinarily relevant to the narrative. How
did this happen? Were they ‘found’ (and presumably doctored) or are they brilliant
concoctions? They make a valuable contribution to the book, although the
writing is what really holds the reader in place.
Of
one of her lovers Amory writes: ‘Even two
minutes in his company provided some comment or observation that would make me
laugh or make me violently disagree with him and so those two minutes of my day
were well spent as a consequence.’ That level of perception about ‘Any Human
Heart’ (one of his best titles) is what makes William Boyd, consistently, a joy
to read. Sweet Caress (I so dislike
the title) is a richly observed story about a life richly lived.
