The acknowledgments for William Boyd’s 16th novel, Sweet Caress, may be unique in that they probably consist entirely of people he has never met and who are now dead. Instead of the usual sentimental guff about editors and agents and loyal spouses, Boyd lists 32 of the 20th-century’s most acclaimed female reporters and photographers, pioneers who made their names in a field dominated by men.
But all is not what it seems. Littered among the names of real women – Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Martha Gellhorn, Dickey Chapelle, Diane Arbus, Rebecca West – are several of Boyd’s fictional creations. There is no record of a Renata Alabama or a Mary Poundstone on Google. And yet both of them appear in the pages of Boyd’s novel and are drawn with such convincing realism that you can’t help but do a double take. You can’t help but want them to exist.
Likewise the documentary photographer Amory Clay, the forthright, complicated, trailblazing heroine of Sweet Caress, who is born in 1908 and whose life spans much of the century. The novel takes the form of several of Amory’s journals, spliced in a satisfying narrative patchwork. Extracts from her 1977 diary, detailing her daily life in an isolated cottage on a Hebridean island, drinking too much whisky and socialising with the doctor and hotelier, are interspersed with flashbacks from her younger days.
She is the product of a semi-aristocratic family – her father, Beverley, is a failed novelist and writer of supernatural short stories on the brink of nervous collapse after serving in the Great War; her mother, Wilfreda, is a distant, rather haughty presence much given to telling people not to make a fuss and get on with things. The defining event in young Amory’s life is her father driving into a lake in an attempt to kill them both. They survive. Beverley is dispatched to an institution and Amory is left never fully believing in the trustworthiness of the men she loves.
Her adult life takes many unexpected turns, leading her from the demimonde of Berlin strip clubs in the 1920s, to fascist riots in London in the 1930s, to the second world war in France and then, later, to Vietnam. Along the way, she loves a handful of men, forges friendships, faces big questions of faith and betrayal and records it all in that haphazardly human way, the importance of key events only becoming obvious in retrospect while the Dr Pepper she once drank in a New York diner remains crystal clear in her mind’s eye.
This is the kind of structural accomplishment that would defeat a lesser writer. But Boyd is a brilliant novelist, whose work has encompassed short stories, plays, screenwriting, thrillers and a James Bond adventure. At the forefront of all he does is the need to engross. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he tells a rollicking good story with the minimum of pretension.
Boyd tracks Amory Clay’s journey from conventional English gentility to celebrated war photographer with an absolute mastery of tone. He has an ability to convey the immediacy of a situation with fluid, precise prose. Here he is describing the sights as Amory is in a helicopter over Vietnam: “Only the scars, the bulldozed brick-coloured scabs on hilltops and ridge-ends of abandoned firebases and observation posts mar the abundant, lush greenery. Looking closer, I see areas of felled or flattened trees, and occasional clusters of rimey, water-filled bomb or shell craters, like pustulant ulcers. The green landscape seems primordial, untouched – but of course it isn’t.”
Amory’s fictional voice never wavers. She can be tricky, contradictory and impulsive, but this only serves to emphasise her realness. She emerges from this novel as a rounded, complex, infernally beguiling human being.
Of course, Boyd has form in blurring the worlds of reportage, history and fiction to great effect. In 1987, he published The New Confessions, a fictional autobiography, covering the first 75 years of the 20th century and notionally “written” by its subject, a maverick film director called John James Todd. Similarly, he invented the “real” artist Nat Tate as part of an April fools’ joke.
In 2002, Boyd pulled off a similar feat in Any Human Heart, regarded by many as his finest work to date. It told the story of the fictional Logan Mountstuart – from his experiences as a spy during the second world war, to his life as an art dealer in 1960s New York and beyond – and came complete with footnotes. In many ways, Mountstuart and Todd are the male counterparts to the protagonist of Sweet Caress. It is clear that Boyd still delights in blending artifice with naturalism – the text is punctuated by photos supposedly taken by Amory and by the occasional portrait, sufficiently blurred to remain just anonymous enough. Even the title of the book is taken from an invented quote lifted from a hypothetical novel written by one of the fictional characters. But the cleverness never overwhelms the narrative. Sweet Caress is an audacious, sweeping, rich layer cake of a novel, at once a textual hall of mirrors and a brilliant tale of a life well lived.
Sweet Caress is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £14.99
