A walk through the colourful life of Amory Clay. She is a professional photographer and an early assignment has her investigating the decadent, colourful, sexually liberated Berlin clubs of the early 1930s. There are passing glimpses of a future facist Germany that will soon spread its evil tentacles over an unsuspecting and sleepy world.
Back in London hosting an exhibition of her own work Amory is intrigued by the rise of Oswald Mosley and his facist followers identified and condemned by their famous black shirts. An unexpected and violent event occurs that changes Amory’s direction and focus.Through a number of casual sexual encounters she marries a soldier of the 2ndWW, a man deeply affected by his experiences resulting in an irreversible and permanent blackness with an inevitable sad conclusion. For a limited time she resides in New York until the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam demands her photographic skills.
William Boyd has a wonderful storytelling technique. He takes a life, an interesting life, and highlights the pivotal moments in that life, decisions taken, choices made, and consequences that followed. We are entertained, we are educated, we are party to the changing face of Germany, the slaughter of WW2 and the catastrophic decisions and campaigns that were the killing fields of Vietnam.

William Boyd is another author that is often recommended to me but that I can't warm to. Not that I dislike his books. On the contrary, I'm often intrigued by his themes and by his writing. I just don't seem to be able to derive any satisfaction out of reading them.

Sweet Caress is a prime example of this dilemma:

The story follows the life of Amory Clay, a woman who in her youth defies the advice of her parents and sets out to become a photographer. Soon thrown into the throng of the roaring twenties and early thirties, she lives a life that is similar to some of the real life individuals that I love to read about. 

And that is just it - I love reading biographies and stories involving the real personalities, and I just can't get my head around why I would want to read a fictional account that involves characters that are somehow based on but are not - not even fictional versions of - the actual individuals of the time.

Why include fictional characters that resemble Anita Berber and Marianne Breslauer, when they could actually be included as characters? I mean, I get that disguising real people as fictional characters is useful, even necessary, to offend contemporaries of the author, but this is hardly the case here. 

After that I lost interest and skim read to the end.

This is just another case where I'd prefer a non-fiction book about the era to a literary attempt at historical fiction.

Sweet Caress is a fictional autobiography of a woman who lived an interesting life during tumultuous times.

Amory Clay was born in 1908 in England and died in 1983 and so experienced or was at least affected by two world wars, the great depression, the War in Vietnam and the social and sexual revolution of the sixties.

As a professional photographer Amory chronicles the changing times giving author William Boyd the opportunity to place her in the middle of the action which enhances the interesting and complicated personal life of his protagonist.

And interesting it is. Her career includes photographing members of high society in London to taking candid shots of the underside of pre-World War II Berlin. She's in New York shooting fashion then back to London working for a news magazine. She's on the front lines in Europe in 1944 and in Vietnam in 1967.

During that time she has an affair with her married boss, a relationship with a French writer, marries a Scottish Lord and has twin daughters.

Sweet Caress is about life - full and unadulterated. Love, heartbreak, birth, death, motherhood, family - it's a rich mix and Boyd keeps the narrative moving hitting the highs and lows, the successes and failures all the while giving us the insights of his remarkable heroine.

His writing is seamless and precise, the characters complicated and appealing, the settings vivid.

Boyd is able to capture the uncertainty of life, how events and other people shape our destiny as much or more than we consciously do ourselves. How seemingly chance meetings and random acts chart our lives. How man plans and God laughs.

Boyd has interspersed photographs and captions throughout this book perhaps to give the reader the experience of reading a journal. However I found these pictures unnecessary. Rather than enhancing the novel they proved disconcerting for two reasons.

I create my own image of the characters I'm reading about. Suddenly seeing them in black and white and having them look nothing like I imagined was off-putting. The second reason is the photographs are very amateur and of poor quality in concept and execution - hardy the work of a professional which, for me, eroded Amory's credibility. It was a good idea that didn't work.

Amory Clay has been enjoying an uneventful middle-class childhood until her father returns, deeply traumatised, from the trenches of the First World War and unsuccessfully attempts to kill himself and her by driving them both into a lake. Now it is Amory who is traumatised. Her promising academic career disintegrates and instead of going to Oxford to study History, she becomes an assistant to her uncle, a society photographer.

It turns out to be the beginning of a career as a photo-journalist that allows her to witness Berlin at the height of its pre-war decadence, Oswald Moseley's Blackshirts marching through East London and the Allied invasion of Normandy. She rubs shoulders with celebrities - even Marlene Dietrich makes a cameo appearance - and has a series of affairs, finally marrying a Scottish Lord and settling down with him on his estate where she is unable to prevent him drinking himself to death.

Gambling debts and her husband's carelessness about his will, leave her in greatly reduced circumstances. So she dusts off her camera once more and sets off for Vietnam. She's in her sixties now but it doesn't stop her dodging bullets and having sex with men half her age.

Structured as pseudo-autobiography, the text is peppered with photographs purporting to be by Amory herself and there is an acknowledgements page at the end in which, I suspect, real and fictional names are deliberately mixed together to bolster the illusion. It's a clever device, allowing the author scope to include almost anything he likes from the compendium of the twentieth century's worst excesses. The downside is that the overall effect is somewhat episodic and the impact of the novel depends to a very great extent on what you feel about the central character.

Therein lies my principal dissatisfaction with this novel.  I didn't really care about Amory Clay, perhaps because I wasn't entirely convinced by her. She always felt to me a bit too much like a man's idea of a free-spirited woman. And if you don't care about the protagonist the whole thing feels a bit like history as theme-park. It's highly readable and very entertaining but I was always slightly troubled by a sense that terrible events were being trivialised.