Faces From A Lost Past

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


William Boyd is one of those authors to whom I have remained loyal over three decades now. I love how each of his books is so totally different from its predecessor. Never has his story-telling settled on anything approaching a 'formula'. The settings and plots always surprise. Nor does he have any qualms about the gender of his protagonists, effortlessly and credibly occupying the points of view of women as easily as men. 'Sweet Caress' is a case in point, since the story is told through the eyes of its main character, a woman with the unusual name of Amory Clay, who becomes a pioneering photographer, covering many things during the course of her long career, including occupied France in the Second World War.

With the life-decisions of Amory Clay at its core, questing for love as well as career success, 'Sweet Caress sweeps us through an impressive array of seismic events in the twentieth century, from Berlin in the 1920s, to New York in the 1930s, to the Blackshirt riots in London, as well as war-torn France. Indeed, structurally at least, 'Sweet Caress' did for once remind me of one of Boyd's earlier novels - the highly acclaimed 'Any Human Heart' which tracks the life of one man, through all its twists and turns, trivial and significant, from the very beginning to the very end. Reading that novel I was one of the few who at times found this structure somewhat arduous for being so linear, and so it was with this story of Amory Clay. Boyd's style is of course always beautifully crafted, but the combination of an essentially matter-of-fact tone and a dead straight time-line (for 450 pages) did occasionally make me long for more emotional colour. Amory Clay carried out and witnessed so many interesting things, but for my tastes Boyd never quite drilled deeply enough into her psyche. By the end I was even fighting a slight sensation of 'so what?'

An element of the novel that worked beautifully however, were the photographs scattered through its pages - 'real' pictures that Boyd found in his research but which he attributes to the lens of his protagonist. A simple but stunning idea, these pictures add an original and wonderful touch of authenticity to the novel, cleverly raising the question of reality which I think Boyd is trying to explore. Amory Clay may be a product of his imagination but the presence of the photographs subtly suggests otherwise. I found them poignant too, snapshots of unknown faces from a bygone era, playing their part in a story they never knew.



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