Sweet Caress: Waterstones Exclusive Edition

Exclusive Waterstones edition, includes an essay by William Boyd on women photographers.

Not for the first time, William Boyd writes a work of fiction dressed up as a real biography. There was Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, so believable it lead to a painting that Boyd himself dashed out in an afternoon fetching £7,250 at Sotheby’s. Then there was 2002’s Any Human Heart, widely considered Boyd’s finest work, written as Logan Mountstuart and complete with footnotes. Similarly, Sweet Caress is a novel convincingly told in the first person about the life of a fictitious artist, in this case female photographer Amory Clay. It’s the fourth time Boyd has written in a female voice, and it not only conjoins his twin interests of British history and middle-class life, is also introduces a new device: the use of found photographs to amp up his script’s authenticity. The master storyteller cleanly adopts this other voice, writing convincingly and plainly as Clay, who cuts back through her life from its current-day Hebridean existence and plainly tells of being given her first camera at age seven; of her father’s attempt to kill them both; of her mother’s coldness; of lovers, infertility, her rise to success in Weimar Berlin; and of her experiences in New York and Vietnam. But overwhelmingly, it is an observation of how the camera, and most particularly war photography, allowed women of the time to professionally rise with relative ease within a male-dominated world.