Does the title indicate that on the Internet a bit of soft porn always goes down well? A not-so-subtle shift to find a new readership? It most certainly does not and you won’t have been fooled as you recognise Sweet Caress as the title of William Boyd’s latest novel.
One day in early March this year, I met my cousin Caroline for lunch at Caraffini in Lower Sloane Street. She had been to a talk at Cadogan Hall given by William Boyd to promote Sweet Caress and, very decently, gave me a copy. She didn’t get it signed on two counts: she would have been late for lunch as there was a queue and a clean copy would be easier to re-gift.
I try and write a follow-up thank you letter when I read a book I have been given so, Caroline, may I dedicate this post to you with my observations and thanks. Actually, I haven’t read it all – I’m about half way through but it’s a good plan to do it this way as I cannot give away any late plot twists inadvertently. Also, don’t imagine that I have finished Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies. I have just finished the fourth book and feel I need a break before continuing.
William Boyd and I go back a long way – to the 1980s when I read his first novel, A Good Man in Africa. It is an accomplished first novel, high on humour though paddling at the shallow end of that emotional swimming pool that novelists like to swim in. It is in the best tradition of comic first novels like Decline and Fall and Lucky Jim.
After that I read An Ice Cream War, Brazzaville Beach, Armadillo, Any Human Heart, Ordinary Thunderstorms, Solo (his James Bond pastiche) and I have bought but not yet read Waiting For Sunrise. This represents perhaps half of his output. I have missed several novels and more volumes of short stories.
WB is no one-trick pony. He adopts different personas with conviction and assurance. In Armadillo he is a young black insurance adjuster, for instance. In Sweet Caress he tells the story of a woman’s life through her eyes. I find it a compelling story artfully related, withholding enough to make me want to read more but well enough written to make me want to linger on every page. Dialogue in novels can be tricky and he pulls it off on two counts. His characters talk in language of the period without any slips, so far. They own their voices. The characters speak as themselves, not as WB. I read an early draft of a first novel by a friend and that was something that needed improvement.
The novel is painted on a broad canvas, as it has to be depicting much of the 20th century. In that respect it is similar to his Any Human Heart and Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. The latter has a well-known opening sentence.
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
I am enjoying Sweet Caress enormously. Now I want to get back to reading it and when I have finished it will be with some other WB first editions in hardback and certainly not re-gifted.