January review: 'Sweet Caress, by William Boyd

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Book: Sweet Caress, William Boyd


Publication date: 2015


WCRG Meeting: 12 January 2017


Rating: 7


Wolfson Contemporary Reading Group met on 12 January 2017 to discuss William Boyd’s novel Sweet Caress. There was, unusually, general consensus regarding the book with all readers gaining a certain level of enjoyment from reading the book and finding it a quick read.

The narrative moves swiftly along following the life of Amory Clay, born in 1908, and destined to become a photographer. Her life is not uneventful especially set against the tumultuous events of the
twentieth century. She is in Berlin in the early 1930s and is saved from an encounter with Nazi Brownshirts, but she is not so lucky in an encounter with Mosley’s fascists in the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936. 

There were some reservations among readers that Boyd’s coverage of such a wide number of eras and events meant that he did not achieve a fully rounded character in his narrator and that the supporting characters were also not fully fleshed out. We wanted to know more about her gay uncle, a photographer of socialites in the early part of the century who encourages her in her photography career, and more on both her daughters who follow such different paths, as well as other characters who litter the book in a cursory way. Boyd touches on important moral topics such as euthanasia, but these are also dealt with in a somewhat non-reflective manner. 

The narrator's contemplation of death later in her life is really a means to allow Amory Clay a chance to review her own life – the life the reader has also lived through the past 450pp. She sums up her life as complicated, but that it is these complications that make her feel alive. But she also sees herself as ‘a certain type of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star in a solar system that’s part of an unimaginably vast expanding universe’. This seems a message for us all. 

In the end the view was that it was a perfectly enjoyable read; Boyd rarely writes a bad book, but it left one with a feeling that it covered too much ground at the expense of depth of characterisation. It is, as someone commented a ‘patchwork view of a human life’, but it is a patchwork that does not work as a whole. The photographs were generally thought to be an interesting addition to the book, adding to the idea that it is a memoir, but no one really felt that they showed her to be a good photographer. Another reader wrote ‘I suppose my four adjectives for the book and its characters/plot would be, like some photos themselves: distant, unpersuasive, flat, black-and-white.’ 

In the end the book gained a credible 7 out of 10.