Complicated, but unfussy

Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory died in 1983; Logan in 1991. Though shaped by the same era, their accounts of their lives are tonally worlds apart. Logan is flamboyant, self-regarding, lyrical, self-pitying; Amory plainer, braver, yet less self-revealing.

Both, of course, are fictional, and both are protagonists woven by William Boyd into novels where they rub shoulders with historical characters. Amory, however, born into an era in which Vivians, Evelyns and Beverleys could be of either sex, is female.

Boyd’s representation of a certain sort of female voice is pitch-perfect, chiefly because he is not trying too hard to signal Amory’s femininity. (It is a good rule of thumb that a bad female impersonator will be altogether too conscious of ‘her’ underwear.) Boyd is interested in a female who is attempting not to be defined by her gender; and there are plenty of pioneering female photographers and journalists as models, to whom Boyd plays tribute at the end of Sweet Caress. It is typical of Boyd, however, that he slips some invented characters into the list alongside the likes of Martha Gelhorn and Diane Arbus.

Logan Mountstuart’s life was told through ‘his’ journals; Amory Clay’s is an ‘autobiography’, written for her descendants, and distanced further by framing her memories within vignettes of the ‘present’, 1977, when Amory is living in an isolated cottage on a Scottish island, with a loyal labrador and a bottle of whisky as her chief comforts. Her evocation of the past is less immediate, less theatrical, less vivid, less repellent and yet less engaging. If all this sounds negative, then it is fair to warn that those who expect a female version of Any Human Heart will be disappointed.