When the birth of Amory Clay, the protagonist of this novel, is announced in the Times in 1908 her androgynous name is taken for that of a boy. It's a prophetic mistake; the life she goes on to lead is distinguished by freedoms few women were afforded during the 20th century. But with freedom comes risk. In London in 1936, she is beaten unconscious by rioting blackshirts; in a French village in 1944, she is caught up in a counter-attack by retreating German forces; and in Vietnam in 1968, she is shot in the leg by a VC guerrilla. Yet Amory's closest brush with death comes early in life and far removed from any war zone, when, on a blustery day in September, her father arrives in his Crossley to pick her up from boarding school and take her out to tea.
Amory's father is a haunting presence, a writer by profession, but after the first World War, his mind never recovers sufficiently for him to return to his "supernatural" short stories. He looms in and out of sight throughout the novel: sitting quietly on the balcony of a picturesque asylum, poring over a chessboard in the shade of a gazebo. But Sweet Caress is Amory's story; she emerges from boarding school and swiftly steps out of her parents' shadow. In London, under the tutelage of her glamorous uncle Greville, she learns how to be a photographer, a skill which lays the template for an unpredictable, exhilarating life; several decades in which, as Amory reflects toward its end: "It's the complications that have engaged me and made me feel alive."
Sweet Caress, in common with Boyd's 2002 novel Any Human Heart, follows the arc of an entire life, played out in accordance with the significant events of 20th-century history. It is cut through with sections in which the elderly Amory, in a farmhouse on a land-bridged Scottish island, looks back and weighs up her life. These sections, so-called "The Barrandale Journal", feel like a voiceover in a film, and there are many filmic elements to Sweet Caress: cross-cuts, flashbacks, pauses for effect. It is also, occasionally, a little hammy. Over the years, Amory engages in a couple of protracted love affairs, and some of the passages describing these wouldn't seem out of place on a Bad Sex Award shortlist. In one of the Barrandale sections, she reflects: "I suppose I should add, in the spirit of fair comparison with the other men whom I have made love with, that Charbonneau's penis was quite small and stubby, though he had a surprisingly large and heavy scrotum," which made me laugh out loud, though not at Charbonneau's penis so much as the incongruity of the sentence.
Visual world
As a photographer, Amory perceives the visual world which surrounds her with particular intensity. In a traffic jam tapering into Manhattan, she watches “the colours of the cars – mushroom, mouse-grey, glossy black, dull crimson – and the sky with great rafters or bars of cloud set against the blue, almost as if measured and deliberately spaced.”
Years later, in the liberated French town of Wesel, she notes how “every other building was a shell, a few walls standing, teetering, roofless, girdled with banks of broken bricks and shattered stonework”.
She is ever susceptible to the photographic possibility of a place, but more so, of its people. Right from when she is a young girl wielding a Kodak Junior, she demonstrates a distinct sensibility: Amory is interested in the quiet moments sandwiched between main events. When working as a fashion photographer for American Mode, she'd rather snap the models chatting and smoking in the dressing room than striking their artificial poses. Later, in Vietnam, she becomes renowned for her pictures of "the soldiers, the grunts, off duty", idling around, waiting. She is also attracted to what she terms "mis-shots": the poignant means by which "only in photography can our errors so easily become real virtues, again and again and again."
Distributed throughout Sweet Caress are a number of small, black-and-white shots which immediately draw the eye. There's something irresistible about old photographs, something wistful and universal. True to Amory's sensibility, they show ordinary, unremarkable scenes, and have the feel of found images, a touch of Sebaldian mystery. Their presence between paragraphs is unobtrusive, even intriguing.
Boyd clearly has a passion for the visual arts which flows into his novels. In 1998, he wrote a pseudo-biography of an American artist called Nat Tate, a young abstract expressionist who, in 1960, burned most of his paintings before throwing himself off the Staten Island ferry. The book caused a short-lived literary conspiracy, with David Bowie and Jeff Koons coming forward to corroborate the fictitious artist’s existence.
A similar sort of question mark hovers over Amory Clay, such that I found myself absent-mindedly searching online for some real trace of her and her photographs. I was reminded of Lee Miller instead. Miller, born in 1907, was also a fashion photographer before becoming a war correspondent, and also travelled through France in the aftermath of D-Day. An audacious woman with an androgynous name who refused to be constrained by her gender – there’s little doubt she was the prototype for Amory Clay.
Boyd excels at creating characters who are convincing despite their extraordinarily complex lives. Amory is, of course, invented, yet knowing this never detracts from the poignancy of her story. Unusually late in life, she is married to a veteran, like her father, only of a different war, and must again bear witness to a man being slowly destroyed by the effects of post-traumatic stress. History repeats itself, as it did so callously during the 20th century. And Boyd repeats himself too: with Sweet Caress, he is rerunning the formula of Any Human Heart which was so successful for him, yet he is also drawing dextrously from his personal sources of fascination and obsession, as every writer should.
Sara Baume is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
