Perspectives
Art Novels:The Fictionist’s Revenge
a n d r e w l a m b i rt h l o o k s at c h r i s t m a s r e a d i n g f o r a rt l o v e r s
P
atrick McGrath is a writer of stature,
a master of what has been called the
gothic, which effectively means he is
prepared to examine the darker side of
human nature – not only the loss of love
but also the loss of sanity. He explores the
habits and perversities of his characters
with compassion as well as with daunting
precision, and has evolved a style which is
pure pleasure to read. Port Mungo (Blooms-
bury, ppb, d7.99, $13.00, 241 pp., ISBN 0-
7475-7415-4) is about a painter, Jack
Rathbone, whose life is told by his adoring
but observant sister, Gin. It is packed with
telling evocations, whether of states of
mind, or the state of Jack’s art. (McGrath
has a nice line in descriptions of individual
paintings as well as styles and the daily
actuality of the studio.) Early on, Gin says
that ‘Jack once told me he believed art to
be primarily a vehicle for the externaliza-
tion of psychic injury’, and the novel
explores this, centring on Jack’s extreme
behaviour and the painting of grief. The
book deals with truth and its variants, with
what people want to believe: the same
story cunningly told from different view-
points, that age-old strategy of revelatory
narrative.
The rich reflective prose circles round
its lush subject (Port Mungo is ‘a once-
prosperous river town now gone to seed,
wilting and steaming among the man-
grove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras’),
as it shifts focus between England and the
Americas, ending up in New York. On
first, intensely enjoyable, reading, I
marked passages of particular acuity or
relevance every few pages. Jack, a ‘latter-
day Gauguin’, and his wild, wild wife Vera
Savage (‘she was a strong artist but a weak
woman. The trick was knowing which was
which’), their daughters Peg and Anna,
hold centre stage throughout. The paint-
ings, tropical, lyrical or spare, filled with
bravura or rage, match the exposition. The
book is romantic all right, also emotion-
ally ravaging, but it is also horribly
believable with a gradual unveiling which
is utterly compelling. It has a flavour
compounded of exotic venues and wilful
r 2006 the authors. journal compilation r 2006 bpl/aah volume 13 issue 4 The Art Book 63
passions, seasoned with art’s prime terri-
tory – ways of looking at the world. As
McGrath observes of Vera: ‘Painters love
ideas, said Jack, they will give their heart
without a qualm to a man who can get an
idea airborne and then move it around like
a kite in the wind’. For once, a novel about
an artist (and his artist wife) which
convinces.
With The Apothecary’s House (Macmillan,
hb, d12.99, $18.17, 534 pp., ISBN 1-4050-
4657-0), Adrian Mathews has written a
thriller set in Amsterdam, dealing with
looted art (very topical) and a revised
dating for the discovery of photography.
For a book concerned at least superficially
with art, it has little sympathy or under-
standing of it. At one point the central
character says ‘You know why I became an
art historian, Jojo? Because I wanted to be
bored shitless’. This is the kind of world in
which you are expected to know what
domestic typology is, but not who Jan
Steen was. Obviously not a book for art
lovers, then. It is full of intensely dislike-
able characters who are further disfigured
by a writing style which rejoices in
dreadful puns and slick-dick badinage.
Illiterate-friendly (or ‘palsy-walsy’ to quote
a phrase) and deeply annoying, it never-
theless draws the reader onward to its
unsatisfactory ending. Best avoided unless
you favour mysteries with a touch of
surveillance paranoia.
‘I like boring things’, said Andy
Warhol, memorably. Maybe he’d have
liked Water, an atrocious attempt at a novel
by the painter Jasper Joffe. It is certainly
boring; in fact it’s unreadable. Water
(Telegram, ppb, d8.99, $15.95, 286 pp.
ISBN 1-84659-004-3) is what is called an
‘illustrated paperback’, which means it
has a line drawing every few pages. These
are not good, but at least they are better
than the execrable text. Matthew Collings
calls this book a page-turner. Turn the
pages by all means, but don’t waste your
time trying to read them.
Two novels about artists have appeared
concurrently from the same publisher
(Picador), The Raft and Van Rijn. The Raft
(hb, d12.99, $12.00, 344 pp. ISBN 0-330-
41847-5) by Arabella Edge is set in Paris
in 1818 and is a vivid account of the
shipwreck of the Medusa, the tragedy that
gave birth to Gericault’s great master-
piece, The Raft of the Medusa. Edge is
brilliant at recounting the dramatic tale
of the ship’s fatal trip to Senegal, and
the cowardly behaviour of the criminally
incompetent captain, who abandoned
passengers and crew to their fate. It is a
story to make even the slow-blooded
indignant, and it is well told, interspersed
with Gericault’s more intimate problems
with the unwanted pregnancy of his
mistress, Alexandrine, the young wife of
his elderly and supportive uncle. Such
carefully crafted walk-on roles as the
egregious Horace Vernet, who swaggers
through these pages, enlighten the mor-
gue studies and cannibalism. Edge is also
good on the kitchen of painting, the
making of a picture, the cuisine. Yet the
book remains an adventure story more
than a novel about a painter: a rattling
good yarn, and an enjoyable read.
Sarah Emily Miano’s novel Van Rijn (hb,
d12.99, $24.05, 475 pp., ISBN 0-330-
41180-2) is a strange beast: experimental
and ambitious, it mixes art history with
various literary forms – play, novel, poem –
in an ungainly hotchpotch. Excitable and
Perspectives
wild, some of its conceits are simply
winsome. (At one point, Rembrandt’s
house is likened to a woman. The
metaphor is misjudged and over-ex-
tended.) The poems are dreadful, and
much of the dramatic dialogue is super-
fluous. There is too much description of
paintings, and not enough of the act of
painting, and the strategy of quoting
Rembrandt’s journal, supposedly discov-
ered by the novel’s ‘hero’, the young
publisher Pieter Blaeu, is a disastrous
one as the diary’s tone is so unconvincing.
(A sample: ‘My sparkling lights could
glorify a pig trough. If anyone says
otherwise I’ll shove this palette up his
back passage!’ This is supposed to be
Rembrandt? As played by Norman Mailer
perhaps.) Yet there is readability hidden
beneath the novel’s pretensions. The
description of Rembrandt’s first appear-
ance is surprisingly compelling, and most
of Blaeu’s sections are entertaining. The
intrigue with his inamorata, for instance,
is vivid, but there are too many red
herrings (as well as pickled ones). To
show off her versatilty, Miano is constantly
breaking into other genres – an exchange
of letters, or a meeting between Descartes
and Sir Thomas Browne – and never
capitalising on her assets.
On page 418 Miano has Rembrandt
slyly caution young Blaeu against writing
an artist’s life: ‘An artist’s life is nothing
but vanity, greed and falsehood. Substi-
tutes for living! Such an undertaking
would require tremendous judgment and
understanding’. The current fashion for
turning out novels about artists (when will
art stop being considered sexy by lazy
editors in the popular press?) has led too
many writers to think they understand the
subject. It is quite evident that they don’t.
And very few have ‘tremendous judgment’
either. It is certainly not evident here. This
novel is over-long and self-indulgent, but
then what would one expect of a book in
receipt of an Arts Council Writers’ Award?
Savage understatement? Miano can write
engagingly, but lacks formal discipline,
unlike Rembrandt. A shame nothing
better could have been produced in the
fiction line to mark his 400th birthday.
John Berger, in the seven short pages of
his brilliant essay ‘Rembrandt and the
Body’ (in The Shape of a Pocket, Bloomsbury,
2001), says a hundred times more.
Conversations with my Gardener (Henri
Cueco, Granta Books, ppb., d6.99, $13.95,
202 pp., ISBN 1-86207-840-8) purports to
64 The Art Book volume 13 issue 4 r 2006 the authors. journal compilation r 2006 bpl/aah
be the memoir of an artist, yet it contains
not a single drawing by Cueco, not even
for the cover. For this place of honour, the
publishers evidently deemed a photo of
a plump man in cap and overalls with a
pushbike and a box of marigolds to be a
better selling point (‘human interest’)
than art. The book is a rambling, episodic
and occasionally gnomic dialogue on the
nature of beauty, full of farmyard rumina-
tions and peasant wisdom (and ignor-
ance). The artist and the gardener discuss
a number of topics from the modern art
museum, to art programmes on TV, to the
Mona Lisa. Gradually the gardener gets
used to the concept of beauty, and sees the
point of it. In the end he actually wants
paintings, so that he may be reminded of
things in case he loses his memory. So art
does have its uses. The comparative
success of this little book testifies to the
huge appetite for enlightenment amongst
today’s disaffected non-believers, who will
latch onto any source of apparent wisdom
even if it is homespun. It is a light read,
quite charming, but its roots are too
shallow to be of real value.
In welcome contrast, Ross King writes
lengthy, apparently well-researched factual
accounts of famous encounters or events
in the history of art. He has already written
a highly praised book, Brunelleschi’s Dome,
on the construction of the Duomo in
Florence, and Michelangelo and the Pope’s
Ceiling (Pimlico, ppb, d7.99, $16.00, 371
pp., ISBN 1-844-13932-8) is the paperback
version of his next narrative blockbuster,
the story of the Sistine Ceiling. Although
his writing is strictly fact rather than
fiction, King adopts a novelist’s breadth
and treatment, the authorial all-seeing eye,
as if to the manner born. (It comes as no
surprise to discover that he also writes
novels.) His depiction of Michelangelo –
‘a squat, flat-nosed, shabbily dressed, ill-
tempered sculptor from Florence’ whose
trademark is ‘muscular nudes in frantic
but graceful gyrations’ – has all the
familiarity of the novelist, and some of
the same possessiveness. The book has a
magnificent donné, a battle of the Titans,
featuring not only Buonarotti but Pope
Julius II, Leonardo and Raphael, with such
figures as Bramante playing good subsidi-
ary roles. The text is filled with convincing
and intriguing detail, and stresses the fact
that the Sistine ceiling was achieved by
group effort. As King writes: ‘The idea of
Michelangelo at the head of a team of
assistants dashes the cherished notion of
the artist toiling alone on his scaffold, on
his back, like Charlton Heston in the 1965
film adaptation of Irving Stone’s novel The
Agony and the Ecstasy’. So does fiction
depart from fact, though it often makes
for a better (or more memorable) story.
Sticking closely to the facts, Michelangelo
and the Pope’s Ceiling is composed in an easy,
readable style, but its scholarly credentials
are firmly displayed in 39 pages of notes,
14 of bibliography and an index. Likewise
King’s new book, The Judgement of Paris,
subtitled ‘Manet, Meissonier and an Artis-
tic Revolution’ (Chatto & Windus, hb,
d17.99, $34.41, 320 pp. ISBN 0701176830)
a tale of two painters and the birth of
Impressionism, is impossible to do justice
to here. Both are a reminder of how
gripping art history can be.
Why are so many novels, ostensibly
about artists, actually about nothing of the
kind? Because art is currently big business,
and the art world attracts the roving
interest of the fiction writer, but the
subjects remain much the same as they
do in other kinds of novel – principally sex
and intrigue. It is almost as if the fictionist
resents the closed-shop exclusivity of the
artist’s world and attempts to render it
ordinary. Rare colours are dulled, tonal
values dimmed, human issues take over.
Usually this kind of treatment, whether
about the real Rembrandt or imaginary
Slather, does nothing to deepen our under-
standing or appreciation of the very
particular plight of the artist. Or else the
temptation is to romanticise the artist
out of all recognition. Equally unhelpful.
Musicians do not seem to be so burdened
with fictional heroics. Lucky them. I could
almost wish that aspiring novelists would
refrain from adopting artists’ lives as
subject matter, and turn to something
easier to comprehend. Even the skilled
hand has difficulty with the artistic voca-
tion. Yet when such fine works of art fiction
as Port Mungo and (not reviewed here) The
Portrait by Iain Pears (HarperPerennial, pb,
d8.99, 224 pp. ISBN 0007202776) con-
tinue to appear, it is difficult to regret the
novelist’s choice; not to mention recent
reported triumphs by Siri Hustvedt and
Mario Vargas Llosa. Keep them coming
please – most of us need a fiction-fix to
make life more bearable.
andrew lambirth
Curator, writer and critic, London
Part I of this assessment of current art fiction
appeared in our last issue.