“Sweet Caress” was the first book I read by William Boyd. I don’t remember how I picked it up, but I do remember being instantly transported into the life of Amory Clay, the book’s androgynously named female narrator telling her story in the first person. I read it obsessively, finished it in three days, and vowed to read everything else I could find of the author’s. It was only when I closed the book and looked at the cover that I realized that, first of all, I’d completely forgotten that the author was a man, and secondly that the book is a novel. Amory Clay is a made-up character, and her story, so blazingly true, is made up, too.
I had been convinced I was reading the autobiography of an extraordinary, adventurous female photographer. The trick is furthered because 73 of Amory’s black-and-white photographs are scattered throughout. And there are occasional appearances or mentions of the real people our protagonist runs into in the course of her adventures. In fact, among the individuals thanked in the acknowledgements are Martha Gellhorn, M.F.K. Fisher, Lisette Model, and Margaret Bourke-White. Since “Sweet Caress” was published in 2015, none of these women could have helped Boyd by reading his manuscript or discussing their careers with him. But they did help him plumb the depths of photographers and journalists like Amory, who worked from the 1920s onward. In an interview when the book was published, Boyd said, “It’s like all these forgotten women photographers are just waiting to be discovered. Amory Clay is based on the legion of 20th-century women photographers and photojournalists, who I discovered had made a living and a reputation alongside their male counterparts.”
Despite the title, the book is not a romance, although Amory has several lovers throughout her extraordinary life. Of one of these she writes:
“I see now that Cleve Finzi was my knight in slightly tarnished armour. The fact that he was handsome and successful, selfish and self-absorbed—not to say a little vapid, from time to time—doesn’t reflect badly on me, I believe. At certain periods of our lives we—men and women—need exactly this type of person. Their easiness on the eye is all you require—handsome men, beautiful women, it’s a pleasure just to be close to them. Then growing maturity tells you that this type of person simply will not do any more and we sense instinctively that we need someone, something altogether more intriguing.”
I found Amory’s take on love and life in all its aspects intelligent, ironic, delightful. But back to the title, “Sweet Caress.” It’s from the book’s epigraph, attributed to one Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau: “However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that—from time to time—you feel life’s sweet caress.” Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau is another fictional character.
The book is set in 1977 in Barrandale, on Scotland’s western coast. Amory, age 70, is looking back on her life, from girlhood onward. Her story starts when her uncle gives her a Kodak Brownie for her seventh birthday.
“I liked taking photographs of people in action—walking, coming down steps, running, jumping, and most importantly, not looking into the lens. I loved the way the camera could capture that unreflecting suspended animation, an image of somebody halted utterly in time—their next step, their next gesture, next movement, forever incomplete. Stopped just like that—by me—with the click of a shutter. Even then I think I was aware that only photography could do that—so confidently, so effortlessly—only photography could pull off that magic trick of stopping time; that millisecond of our existence captured, allowing us to live forever.”
Amory’s professional life begins in the 1920s, first as a society photographer—not so satisfying. To make a name for herself, she goes to Berlin, recording the decadence of the Weimer era in the early 1930s. You can almost hear the music from “Cabaret” in the background. Then she becomes a staff photographer for Global Photo Watch, an international publication producing something like a Life magazine, a position she holds for most of the rest of her career and which opens doors for her in Paris, London and New York.
Readers observe many of the great events of the 20th century through Amory’s lens. She is there when fascist Blackshirts riot in London in the ’30s, in the Vosges mountains in France on the frontlines during World War II, and in Vietnam in the 1960s. There are tragedies, there is life’s sweet caress. This is personalized, relatable, historical fiction. A wonderful book in every way.
Doris Ober is the former managing editor of the “West Marin Review,” author of “The Dogtown Chronicles” and “The Alzheimer Years,” and an avid reader. She lives in Point Reyes Station.