A Sweet Caress, A Beating Heart: Lives lived to the Full – two engrossing offerings from Audible.

Sweet Caress; the Many Lives of Amory Clay by William Boyd

This title has been in my Audible Library for some months.  Somehow I had not got round to downloading it from the Cloud onto my Device, favouring more immediate urges for easy listening, by which I mean thrillers and stories that have a classic structure of a beginning, middle and end.  In point of fact once I settled to Sweet Caress I found that it had a coherent, compelling and chronological structure and was easy to get into. 

This is a story of a life lived to the full.  Through this life, that of Amory Clay, a brave, feisty, characterful woman who becomes a professional photographer, William Boyd tracks some of the defining moments of the 20^th century as told through her camera lens.

  Her professional life, during which she looks for life, love and artistic expression, spans the decadent demi-monde of late 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the violence of the Blackshirt Riots in London in the same decade and where she receives an injury that will dog her life, and to the Rhineland in the Second World War.  She also, despite her advancing years for a frontline photographer, sees ‘service’ in Vietnam. 

Amory’s father is a flaky paternal figure.  She is born in the decade before the First World War and her disappointed father gives her an ambiguous name and announces the birth of a son.  She has patchy memories of his intervals of leave and there is a bizarre and vivid incident when he drives to pick her up from boarding school, ostensibly to go off on a jaunt, and tries to drive himself and Amory in their car off a bridge to commit suicide.  It is her gay photographer Uncle Greville, who is a more stable and nurturing influence, who gives her a camera, this gift representing the defining moment of her life.

Endings are tricky.  If you have been held by a book all the way through you expect a ‘good’ ending.  It may be happy or sad but if you are me you don’t like ambiguity, you don’t like to feel you have been sold short either.  Boyd’s ending to Sweet Caress is a good one, with a twist of surprise at the very close.    

Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks                                                                               

The Literary Review has written that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time"; he has been named "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation ... who is growing in authority with every book".  He is best known for his three novels set in early 20^th century France: The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.  These were published in the late 80s and early 90s.  Fast forward to 2015 and in Where My Used to Beat Faulks returns to that wartime era, but has shifted his arena for the action. 

The novel contains more than one of Faulks’ main recurring themes, the World Wars of the 20^th century and he sheds a long and woeful light over the 20^th century as glimpsed through the life of Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has experienced the best and worst of times in that century.

  On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor is forced to confront the events that made up his life.  The agent of this process, Hendricks’ host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man who is living on borrowed time, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.


To try and make sense of events and people who have shaped his life Hendricks must explore events and his experiences during the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that is never resolved, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally – unforgettably – back into the trenches of the Western Front.  Here Faulks has written an intensely vivid, insightful and heartbreaking passage of unbearable tragedy which epitomises the attitude of the higher echelons of military power in the arena of the First World War towards its ‘foot soldiers’, the millions of souls who were drummed up as little more than cannon fodder, whilst the generals parked themselves in their makeshift canvas headquarters at the rear of the battlefield and dreamt up new manoeuvres for their plans of campaign.

It is a complex novel, representing, in common with Boyd’s Sweet Caress, a commentary on the 20^th century.  Such a complex novel deserves a more detailed and insightful review and for this I attach the following link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/01/23/struggles-heart/q8snoR1kLJN7i1gzzxaLTJ/story.html