How Sweet the Caress?

William Boyd’s big new novel, rather uninvitingly entitled Sweet Caress, is not winning the best of reviews. Is it as poor as it is said to be? It was still on my reading list when I was warned off it by a close friend and Boyd enthusiast who told me he had passed the 30 per cent marker in his Kindle edition - Kindle still employing percentages rather than page numbers as gauges, perhaps because of the variety of font sizes they employ as aids for readers who, like me, have bad eyesight - and that his interest in it was dwindling. The book, he said, was deeply disappointing.

The story of a woman photographer born in 1908, it toys with reproductions of her pictures (in reality anonymous odds and ends Boyd had evidently acquired in car-boot sales), with walk-on roles for twentieth-century celebrities (a device which, like some other novelists, he has sometimes irksomely employed in previous travels into the past) and, aptly enough, with a sort of snapshot literary technique which gives the book an extremely fragmented structure.

Was I going to like it, I wondered, as I picked up my Kindle at page 0 per cent? Since I generally enjoy the innovatory aspects of Boyd’s literary style, I did not feel automatically opposed to those that are incorporated in Sweet Caress. I began by liking it quite a lot, but by the time I reached the 30 per cent point, my enthusiasm for it, like my friend’s, had begun to wane.

The fragmentation, especially in its Scottish sections, set on an island near Mull in 1977, failed to grip. But I persevered, and never wholly lost faith in it. It is really quite a good read, if sometimes uneven and sometimes, by Boyd’s high standards, somewhat slack.

I would like to read a review of it by Geoff Dyer, a good writer and novelist who shares Boyd’s affection for cameras and photography, but who has not yet pronounced upon it. How accurate it is in terms of photographic information, of which there is an abundance  (always in my view quite interesting), I cannot say.

But my friend, a fellow music critic, has pointed out to me that it contains, as so many modern novels do, at least one musical howler, a reference to Bartok which is wrongly dated.  Read Ian McEwan’s novels to find some similar mishaps.

The next book of its kind, employing the twentieth century as its backdrop, will be from Sebastian Faulks.  Let us hope for the best.
7 September 2015