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?

The Leopard by Giovanni de Lampedusa

We are in the mid-nineteenth century in what we now call southern Italy. But then it was specifically Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples under the Bourbons. Within the pages of The Leopard, there unfolds a tale of landed gentry doing their specific things alongside the nation's general struggle for unification. There are numerous touches of brilliance, but overall it's a book I probably would prefer not to have read, despite particular moments of brilliance. Talking about the Bourbon's palace - Capodimonte - he says that the architecture is sound, but the decor and detail leave a lot to be desired - rather like the Bourbons themselves.

There are betrothals, weddings and much celebratory eating. There are also politics and liberation for Italy, albeit elevating yet another King, Victor Emmanuel, who was nevertheless something of a foreigner for these people in the south.

There is much to commend this book, especially the elegance and wit of the writing. But the modern reader may find the atmosphere just a little too stuffy.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan

The Innocent by Ian McEwan is a spy novel. It's a love story. It's not a whodunnit, but it is a who did what. It's also a tour of 1950s Berlin. Getting tied up in labeling genres becomes a pointless exercise, when it is far easier to state that this book is a novel. And this label denotes something much broader, deeper and certainly less predictable that any genre placement. When an author writes a novel, the imagination involved can take the book, its characters, the writer and then the reader along any path, towards any subject. Like the writer, a character need not feel duty bound to spend every waking hour in pursuit of a linear plot to ensure it reaches some endpoint. Life, like experience, itself, is not like that. No matter how focused we may become on any activity, consciousness always presents us with a jumble of stimuli and experiences. We may select  what we choose to see, to hear or to acknowledge, but the rest is always there, intruding. And for The Innocent of Ian McEwan's novel life takes numerous unforeseen turns, despite having started in a form that for most people would itself be a very special starting point.

The principal character is a telephone engineer-cum-electronics whizz-kid. But we are in the 1950s, when such things still relied on old fashioned telephones, cables and, crucially, tape recorders. This last ingredient gives away the fact that the novel is set in the permanent spying of the Cold War and this is also spiced by the setting near the division in Berlin between East and West, between a British-American capitalist enterprise and Soviet communist experiment. The plan is to tunnel as far as a run of cables on the other side, listen in and then analyse the recorded communications. Our lad from Dollis Hill in London has not only been trained for such work, but has a reputation for being something of a genius of the genre.

But like most lads, he likes a drink and, though he is far from experienced with women, he is also capable of falling for a woman. He, of course, does just that. She is German, older than him and more experienced. An essential art of Ian McEwan's book is the way these lovers discover how to be with one another from their individually different starting points.

Unfortunately, she is married, and the husband, who is still current and not former, is a tough guy who drinks a lot and doesn't look after himself. He unfortunately can look after himself and is well known for doing just that.

It has to be recalled that Ian McEwan's nickname at the start of his career was Ian Macabre, and The Innocent does not disappoint. The triangle works itself out and becomes at least a quadrilateral when an apex is deleted only to be replaced by others.

Love Is Blind by William Boyd

Love Is Blind by William Boyd is a real page turner. But the reader’s interest is never generated by cheap melodrama concerning threatened turns in an essentially linear plot. On the contrary, many a reader might finish this book and muse on exactly what the plot might have been. The revelation is that, as with most novels by William Boyd, it is the credible and unique lives of the characters that have provided both the interest and the stimulus to know more.

These characters are not what might be encountered in most novels of the page-turner variety. Brodie Moncur is a Scottish piano tuner who is employed by the quality makers Channon in Edinburgh. Brodie develops some neat tweaks that enhance the sound and playability of the machines placed under his care. He also has some ideas about how Channon might become a little more than a Scottish name. A period in the company’s emergent Paris office might help.

Brodie’s great idea is to sponsor a concert performer who will thus advertise the brand. An Irishman called Kilbarron accepts Brodie’s offer and all seems to be going very well indeed. And all does go very well, especially in relation to Brodie’s relationship with Kilbarron’s partner, a Russian soprano called Lika Blum.

A novel like Love Is Blind is simply about people. To describe their lives is to spoil the book’s currency. Suffice it to say that there are complications of many kinds along the way. Neither true love nor commerce nor music runs along a smooth path for these characters. Central to the book’s success is the credibility of Brodie’s commitment to his relationship with Lika, however, and it is this that binds everything together.

Brodie’s relations with his family are strained by a father who wants to disown him, and his relations with the Channon company also hit hard times for unexpected reasons. He moves across Europe in search of somewhere both safe and convenient to ply his trade and pursue his interest in Lika. In an unlikely turn of fate, he eventually finds his way to India to work alongside an American anthropologist. But then the detail is the plot, and we learn about his journey to India at the very start of the book, before in fact we have even met to protagonist himself.

But what is so engaging about William Boyd’s characters is their total credibility, no matter how unpredictable the events themselves become. By the end of the book, we feel we really have shared their experience and indeed lived through it with them.

The Shores of the Adriatic – The Austrian Side – The Künstenland, Istria, and Dalmatia by F Hamilton Jackson 1908

 

Interesting to read this account of a journey – not the author’s first to the area – while travelling through part of it. The writing makes me regret I did not include a trip to Aquileia in our itinerary. It makes one realise that it’s not possible to do everything and that there is an awful lot of human history to see.

The striking thing about Hamilton’s book is his forensic approach of church architecture and decoration. It seems that each and every ecclesiastical site is for him a veritable museum full of artefacts, artistic styles and architectural techniques. Even the smallest of churches is treated with the same meticulous eye and pen.

A second and utterly memorable part of his work is how his historical paradigm is so completely different from that of the contemporary traveller. He spends most of his time in Austria. It was indeed only in the 1950s that Trieste, for instance, became part of Italy. Piran was a Venetian city. Places have been part of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Papal States, Venice, Genoa – and more than once! Serbia, Byzantine empire, Roman empire, Greek, Slovenian, Croatian, Kingdom of Naples, Norman… Our eyes can only see the world it has experienced. And so when the contemporary traveller visits places like these, we somehow cannot shake off the assumption that the historical evidence ought to fit into the same paradigm. We all know that Maribor used to be Marburg, that Bratislava used to be Pressburg, that it was once the capital of Hungary… But how much of this is merely part of our specific and therefore biased assumptions? Hamilton seems fully aware at all times that the very identity of these places has been transformed many times, but he is also aware of the fact that the most powerful influence is always found in the identity of those who live there. His approach to culture is rather anthropological for today’s tastes, but he is usually sympathetic, except when exigencies of travel intervene. It must also be recorded that there have been, even recently, major population movements, expulsions and attempted genocides. It’s all part of the history… human, at that…

The quality of his portrayal makes me want to revisit the area quite soon and travel down the coastal towns and islands of the Adriatic. There is much to see, though the ramshackle quaintness he encountered is certainly no longer in evidence.

A surprising and often-encountered aspect of the book is the number of times he and his party of travellers are stopped by police, immigration officers and the like on grounds of security. They were carrying cameras and the official types could not comprehend that people wanted to record architectural details such as mullions and roofs. They must surely be spies or thieves or both. In an era where there is a photo every centimetre, where we travel freely without borders and even use the same currency across countries, one has to utterly thankful for the changes. Tell that to the British.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Claudi Arimany plays Mozart Flute Quartets and Marco Tezza plays Schubert, Janacek and Schumann

 

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the middle of October, and Alfas del Pi has three concerts in the renewed cycle of La Sociedad de Conciertos de la Música Clásica. Friday and Sunday were solo piano recitals by Marco Tezza, while on Saturday, in Casa Cultura, we heard Claudi Arimany and the Beaux Arts Trio in Mozart’s four flute quartets.

The Mozart quartets offer about an hour of music. As soloist, Claudi Arimany called the tune and chose generally fast tempi for the allegros, including the rondos. This is not demanding music, but it is pleasurably tuneful, memorably so. But there are also moments of elegance. It is this mix of the simple and sophisticated, the utterly ordered alongside elements less predictable that has maintained the popularity of Mozart’s music for over two centuries. It was a perfect opportunity for Claudi Arimany to display his unquestionable virtuosity, whilst Joaquin Palomares, David Fons and Gonzalo Meseguer, the members of the Beaux Arts Trio, played their substantial part.

The two piano recitals by Marco Tezza presented the Alfas audience with something of a challenge. The Friday programme was Schubert’s Sonata in B flat D960 coupled with In The Mists by Leos Janacek, whilst on Sunday he repeated the Schubert, but coupled it with Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe, opus 133.

Schubert’s last sonata for piano is a challenging work under any hands. It is one of the longest piano sonatas ever written and its deceptively light textures often give way to dark, depressed corners of the human psyche as its composer contemplated what was to prove a fatal illness and an approaching death that was only weeks in the future. And, given he had suffered symptoms for several years, he was certainly aware of the process.

The work’s tempi markings are possibly ambiguous, but most pianists stick at least roughly to the broad moderato of the first movement in the even broader andante of movement two. But the first movement is moderato qualified by the composer with “molto” and the andante of the second with “sostenuto”. The mind could spend quite some time working out how to be “very” moderate or indeed how walking maybe “sustained”, other than by not actually stopping.

Now it appears that most pianists interpret the first movement’s pace at the allegro end of moderato and the second’s andante towards adagio. The notable exception to this pattern was Sviatoslav Richter, whose YouTube performance of the piece from 1972 is timed at over forty-seven minutes, with the opening moderato running to twenty-four minutes. Most performances, however, do not run to such lengths. Alfred Brendel, for instance, albeit ignoring a repeat or two, could deliver the work in just over thirty-five minutes.

Imagine, then, the level of surprise when, preparing to introduce the concert, Marco Tezza asked me to request that there should be no applause between movements because the piece would last no less than fifty-five minutes. And it did. I would not have been surprised if he had said thirty-five minutes. I would have questioned forty-five, but fifty-five just passed over me, so unexpected it precluded reaction.

And it was the first two movements that stretched time. Rather than a life story told at a story-teller’s pace, the movement became an autobiographical reflection, a series of questions, perhaps from a dying composer’s rambling diary, all of which led to the repetition of “Did I deserve this?” It is a work I have heard hundreds of times, but Marco Tezza’s performance was immediately something different when, at the end of the opening phrase, I became conscious for the first time that there is a clashing semitone in the harmony. The second movement became a long bout of self-pity, interspersed with what came across as memories, telling of better times in the past that contrasted ever more bleakly with the dark present.

Movements three and four were more conventional, but because of what had preceded them, they took on the sense of denials, expressing an inability to face up to the reality that had demanded attention in the first two.

I admit that after the Friday concert I was not convinced. After Sunday’s concert when he repeated the work, I was. It’s an approach that will not replace the existing B-flat sonata in my head but will now live forever alongside it as a different take on what had become the composer’s uncomfortable reality. And, by the way, the Janacek In The Mists on Friday night and the Schumann Gesänge der Frühe on Sunday both contributed to and indeed emphasized the feeling of introspection. On both occasions, we were sent home with a little encore, Chauncey Olcott’s arrangement of My Wild Irish Rose, played, believe it or not, very slowly and introspectively. Music is a very powerful language, especially when understated.

 

Theodoric the Goth: Barbarian Champion of Civilization by Thomas Hodgkin (1897)

The fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian era are often listed as part of what we dismissively label as the “Dark Ages”. These times saw the fall of Rome, repeatedly, and the following centuries that were not well documented, compared to what had gone before. For many of modern mind, this era marks the end of what was assumed to be the civilizing influence of the Roman Empire on the world as it was known. This assumption is immediately challenged by the title of Hodgkin’s provocative and detailed account of the life of Theodoric and his dynasty.

History, when truthfully and fairly examined rather than pre-judged is always more nuanced than populist assumptions allow.  There were not many of Rome’s emperors, especially those from the later years of the empire, that can claim to have done much for civilization. Constantine, of course, two centuries before the period covered by this book had adopted Christianity as the Empire’s official religion and had moved the imperial capital to Byzantium. But on closer examination it can be argued neither of these acts was driven by anything other than pragmatism or perhaps the vanity we still associate with absolute power. For Constantine, Byzantium was simply closer to home than Rome and the iconography of the new religion provided opportunity for political self-promotion in a way that would not offend those who retained previously established beliefs. Early Christian art in the period after Constantine’s adoption of the religion suggest that it was the Emperor, himself, who became the acceptable image of Christ, if perhaps not God. And it was this image that persisted for several centuries before the long-haired, bearded and heavily romanticized image we generally associate with the name became currency.

Anyone who has visited Ravenna knows the artistic achievement of the so-called barbarians. There was perhaps no great innovation in their work, but the very fact that continuity is an identifiable trait again contradicts the populist view that civilization was brought to an end by these sackers of Rome.

It is true that for many decades Theodoric and his dynasty were associated with warfare, power struggles and political intrigue. But was this any different from what had preceded their rule? Probably not very much, not so different from what went before to justify the label “barbarian” that we generally attach to the era.

Hodgkin’s book has much detail, and sometimes that detail is quite hard to assimilate, especially so since many people appear to share names. But reading an account of this era is nothing less than eye-opening for anyone not familiar with the all-important detail that so often contradicts the popular view. The Barbarian Champion of Civilization is thus capable, like all good historical accounts, of challenging these received opinions, encouraging re-evaluation and thus enlightening dark minds in perhaps darker ages.