Sweet Caress by William Boyd

Sweet Caress, the tile of William Boyd´s 2015 novel, refers to the gentle contact the individual makes with the very surface of existence, the contact we loosely call “life”. It presents “The many lives of Amory Clay” that are contained in its principal character’s existence. As has become the author´s forté, William Boyd again brings to life a character who lives through the history of the twentieth century, impinging upon it, influencing it, being influenced and changed by it and thus consumed by it. It´s called life, and it’s linear, constantly reviewed but never relived, always surprising, but at the time apparently predictable. Like history, it’s just one thing after another.

William Boyd´s characters are always carefully but lightly drawn. They are never easily caricatured, and even less easily summarised, rather like people, in fact. Their identity is amassed from their experience of life, congeries of circumstance and chance. And, like a great artist, the author manages to create rounded, credible people from the very lightest strokes of his brush, leaving the reader to create whatever detail makes sense. But they also retain a complexity that makes them convincingly real. These different lives of the subtitle always evolve apparently authentically from Amory Clay´s circumstance and so the transition from one setting to the next, though often abrupt, appears possibly inevitable, but always credible.

Amory Clay, female, lives this sweet caress of life, despite having been described at birth as her parents' son. She is taught an intriguing habit by a relative of describing people in four adjectives. Complex, indulgent, direct, driven. It´s a game that Amory Clay plays throughout her life and one she passes on to others, so this activity emerges occasionally throughout the book and introduces the reader to people that otherwise might take pages to describe. It is the verbal equivalent of a snapshot, a partially accurate freezing in time of a view of another person, but inevitably always taking a selfie.

Amory Clay´s family is inoffensively middle class, dangerously so, especially after her father returns a changed man from the First World War. Parcelled off to boarding school because someone else is paying for the opportunity, Amory does well, resentfully well, until events change her life. There will be no going back. Life´s sweet caress becomes a push onto a different and diverging path.

Photography motivates Amory. From her first click of a box camera, she is captivated by its possibilities. She turns her back of what the average professional might pursue to make a living to explore the possibilities of social record, photojournalism, the bizarre or images of chance. And then she pursues a photographer’s life, making her living from whatever genre of her chosen profession presents opportunity. She is afraid it will not pay the rent, but it does, and often things go quite well, for a while. She has ideas that it might even make her famous, but infamy is always near, always an option, sometimes preferred. Circumstances are often dangerous, both for her and the objects of her gaze, but then danger often unlocks new doors and paves a way via a new chapter to security.

Professionally and personally, Amory Clay visits various countries and continents, places and events, wars and country estates. She has relationships with men she encounters, but rarely on a short-term basis. She both drinks and makes love copiously. She is injured and recovers, partially, she thinks. She endangers her own life and places others in peril, but she adds emotional and experiential value to the lives of all she encounters, including the readers of William Boyd’s invention of her history. She even once kisses a woman, albeit one dressed as a man, in a doorway as a ruse to divert the attentions of potential attackers on the rampage.

By the end of this beautiful novel, we feel we not only know Amory Clay, but we also empathise with her and identify with her. Saying goodbye leaves almost a sense of bereavement. We have lost someone close and dear, perhaps we have even lost a part of ourselves, as a certain Lady Farr comes to the end of her adopted aristocratic life. It is she who writes her contemporary journal as a commentary to the memories of Amory Clay, the photographer, and who is, we know from the start, that same Amory Clay who became Lady Farr. How she became a titled landowner is just another story, completely unlikely, but no more so than any of the rest and, in the hands of William Boyd, utterly credible. Our encounter with Amory Clay’s many lives takes us to places we have never been and will never go, allows us to share a life we will never live and enriches our own memory via its shared, imagined, experience.

As ever in William Boyd’s writing, there is always one real gem only partially hidden amongst the history. In Sweet Caress it appears via a photograph taken by chance in Vietnam by Amory Clay, a record that will have to be expunged from the record if history is to remain written in its usual partially inaccurate way. But why single out one particular gem in this veritable jewel box of a novel?

Over There: War Scenes On The Western Front by Arnold Bennett

Over There: War Scenes On The Western Front by Arnold Bennett clearly sets out to offer a mildly propagandist view of the First World War. Within a few pages of the start of its survey of sites of recent action in France and Belgium, we have learned that - apparently immutably - on the one hand France and its culture represent just about the pinnacle of human achievement, while on the other everything German is barbaric, aggressive and wantonly destructive. But by the end of the book, even Arnold Bennett seems no more than merely exhausted, merely bombed-out, like the skeletal remains of the city of Ypres he was then describing. It is this transformation through the progress of this short book that makes it still worth reading.

Where Vera Brittain’s Testament Of Youth sees the consequences of the first World War’s conflict in generally human terms, Arnold Bennett approaches his descriptive task with the sentiment and mission of a propagandist. He was there to fly the flag, there is no doubt. But he had already lived for several years in France and was also a professional journalist. Over There: War Scenes On The Western Front is therefore less of a personal reflection and more of an attempt to provide a - theoretically, at least - dispassionate, if committed and one-sided view of the conflict.

Today, passages that scorn German tactics because they seem bent on the destruction of architectural heritage read as merely quant. We all know that the reality of war demands destruction, especially of symbols of power and identity. As an example, one wonders what the strategic value was of bending flat a grotesquely over-sized metal Saddam Hussein? Precisely none, since this was clearly an act driven by its symbolism. We also know that scruples are not ammunition in war and that defenders and aggressors alike often hide behind the communally sacrosanct, first for potential cover and second for the potential propaganda value should the first aim fail. When Arnold Bennett expresses anger at German shelling of Gothic cathedrals in places such as Rheims, one wonders, given the opportunity, what he might have made of carpet bombing of German cities in World War Two? We know that his view would have remained partisan, but such a stance was only to be expected, given his journalistic associations and the politics of his employers.

It is when Arnold Bennett is touring the destroyed city of Ypres that the doubts really begin to surface. Bennett was a believer in the worth of everyday experience. As a novelist he at least aspired to the basing of his work on quite ordinary lives, believing them to be inherently of interest because of their simple humanity. In Ypres he describes the wrecked houses of ordinary people who were forced out, bombed out, chased away or merely killed. Questions clearly arise in his mind about the nature of war, but they never quite become explicit enough to demand answer.

Over There: War Scenes On The Western Front by Arnold Bennett is a short book that is worthy of re-reading today for two reasons. One is Arnold Bennett’s journalistic ability to describe what he saw. Through this he is able to provide a vivid and reasonably accurate account of day-to-day warfare in the trenches. But secondly, Arnold Bennett writes from the committed, partisan position of a man of his times. There is no detachment in his view, only commitment and conviction. This reminds us that in times of war, at least for the protagonists, there is no scope for detachment, since taking sides is part of the action.