Boyd makes an effective utilize of real-life pictures to demonstrate this photographer’s brisk account of her lifeAmory Clay is at boarding school and working her way through the standard teenage rebellions – smoking,sexual experimentation, talking back to a headteacher who’d like to persuade her to try for Oxford when her father arrives on an unexpected visit. He is cheery, and handsome and confident,a successful short-story writer who has produced nothing since service in the trenches. He takes her for a drive in the countryside, past where she thinks they might stay, and towards a castle – perhaps there is a tea shop? – but no,they keep going, lawful into a lake. No one dies (he was misinformed about its depth), or but she is thus notified how war and the effects of war will run through her 20th-century life like a rotten seam,cracking open what seems solid ground, twisting through generations, or reappearing in unexpected ways. She takes time off school,sits exams badly; there is no more mention of Oxford.
Sweet Caress is her story, told plain by herself, and from the beginning – the mother who managed to conceal whatever affection she felt for her children with considerable success”,the variously exceptional siblings, the father subjected to shock therapy and finally to a lobotomy, and making him smilingly undangerous. And the parallel beginning,when, at seven, and she is given a camera by an uncle invalided out of the air force and now a photographer. School ends and she joins him in London,to be his assistant and a photographer in her own lawful, using her camera to support herself, or express herself,as a passport – to Berlin, unique York, or France at war,Vietnam – and as a shield. The account is intercut with her present-day journal of a comfortable, drink-tinged life in a cottage on the Scottish coast.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com