Review
Author: William Boyd
Reviewed by: Rob Bunzel
Issue: June 2017
I have enjoyed all of Boyd's novels, and previously reviewed Restless (2006) and Solo (2014) for TRE. I finished Boyd's latest book in Honolulu on a deck overlooking Diamond Head in the level light of an early May evening as a green parrot flew by. Boyd today is one of Britain's most celebrated storytellers. Sweet Caress reminds me most of Any Human Heart (2002). Both are lifelong stories that depict and deftly dwell on the most enduring concerns across cultures and continents: war, love, children, time, and death: "Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops toward the finish line." These Boyd volumes can pass confidently between spouses. Sweet Caress is the fictive story of British female photographer Amory Clay, narrated in the first person as a memoir set between her birth in 1908 and 1978, interspersed with grainy black and white photographs that track events and people in the narrative. (Anyone suspicious of this technique should pick up any later work of W.G. Sebald who mastered meshing of photographic and word media.) The book rotates between a 1977 retrospective journal written in Barrandale Scotland (isolated walks with her black labs Flim and later Flam), and longer sections set before WWII, during and after the war, in the Vietnam war and later in California. The protagonist is headstrong from the start, determined to be a professional photographer in a male-dominated business. She is a drinker and smoker and her liaisons with half a dozen men frame the book. Her scandalous pictures of prostitutes at the Xanadu-Club Berlin in the early 1930's run Amory afoul of British censorship and toward a career in New York, sorties to Guadalajara, and by 1936 a return to cover the Maroon Street blackshirt (fascist) London riots, where she is seriously beaten to the point of near death requiring several years' recovery. In the 1940's Amory photographs D-Day, the liberation of France ("Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion"), dangerous battles in retaking French towns, the crossing of the Rhine, and her firsthand search of a crashed Typhoon bomber that killed her pilot brother Xan. While carrying on an affair with a French officer and author, Amory meets Lord Sholto Farr during the war and quickly marries the Scottish baron and has twin daughters despite earlier diagnoses that she was infertile from her prior beating. Later in life as a widowed and displaced Lady Farr, she unpacks her cameras and inveigles an assignment in 1966-68 Vietnam, again brushing against death, love and this time British spycraft. The book's last episodes find Amory tracking down her runaway musician daughter in late 70s Southern California, and then back in Barrandale ruminating on death to be "at her own hand," given a progressively debilitating palsy. Boyd's gift is to wrap so many of these life and historic signposts into a breezy delightful read.