Category: HF Reading Challenge

#BookReview The Diver and the Lover by Jeremy Vine

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About the Book

It is 1951 and sisters Ginny and Meredith have travelled from England to Spain in search of distraction and respite. The two wars have wreaked loss and deprivation upon the family and the spectre of Meredith’s troubled childhood continues to haunt them. Their journey to the rugged peninsula of Catalonia promises hope and renewal.

While there they discover the artist Salvador Dali is staying in nearby Port Lligat. Meredith is fascinated by modern art and longs to meet the famous surrealist.

Dali is embarking on an ambitious new work, but his headstrong male model has refused to pose. A replacement is found, a young American waiter with whom Ginny has struck up a tentative acquaintance.

The lives of the characters become entangled as family secrets, ego and the dangerous politics of Franco’s Spain threaten to undo the fragile bonds that have been forged.

Format: Hardback (368 pages) Publisher: Coronet
Publication date: 3rd September 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The author has taken an actual historical event – the making of Salvador Dali’s painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross, which is in the collection of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow (but currently on loan to the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain) – and surrounded it with a generous helping of fiction. For example, there is an imagined role for Dr Tom Honeyman, the man who acquired the painting for the museum, in a particularly dramatic scene towards the end of the book.

The main leap of authorial imagination is that the man who in real life acted as the model for the painting, Hollywood stuntman Russell Saunders, was replaced by a young American waiter. This provides the opportunity for the author to introduce a love story – albeit one of the ‘love at first sight’ variety whose credibility I often struggle with.

The Diver and the Lover is the author’s debut novel and it does show in places, such as the inclusion of the occasional “information dump” – I don’t think I really needed to know how many bullets a minute a Lee Enfield rifle fires – and a rather over-the-top female villain.

For me, the most compelling character in the book was Ginny’s older sister, Meredith. The story of her early life is tragic but the response to her mental breakdown is even more tragic and a shocking indictment of the attitude to mental illness at the time. Ginny’s gentle support of her sister’s recovery is moving even if Ginny doesn’t fully understand the reason for Meredith’s intense interest in Salvador Dali’s work.

The events surrounding the making of this particular painting were completely new to me and I enjoyed this aspect of the novel. (Having an image of the painting in the book would have been helpful but I imagine rights issues perhaps didn’t make that possible.) The story also filled in some gaps in my knowledge of Salvador Dali’s life, for instance the consequences of his support for General Franco’s regime. In the book he comes across as an intensely self-absorbed and rather petulant individual. ‘To Dali an occasion was special once her arrived. It ceased being special once he left.’ However, one glance at the painting demonstrates it is the work of an artistic genius.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Coronet via NetGalley.

About the Author

Photo: BBC Radio 2 website

Jeremy Vine is one of the UK’s best-known broadcasters. He presents a weekday show on Radio 2, radio’s most popular news programme. He also presents Jeremy Vine on Channel 5, a daily current affairs programme. Jeremy is an accomplished journalist and writer and has previously published two works of non-fiction. He lives in Chiswick with his wife and their two daughters.

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#BookReview Mrs Whistler by Matthew Pamplin #MrsWhistler

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About the Book

Chelsea, 1876. Struggling artist Jimmy Whistler is at war with his patron. Denied full payment, he and muse Maud Franklin face ruin.

As Jimmy’s enemies mount, he resolves to sue a famous critic for libel, in a last-ditch attempt to ward off the bailiffs. Although she has no position in society, Maud is expected to do her part.

But Maud has a secret that forces her to choose between art and love.

Format: ebook (465 pages) Publisher: The Borough Press
Publication date: 3rd May 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Based on actual events, Mrs Whistler is the story of artist James MacNeill Whistler, a man so convinced of his own genius that he embarks on an ill-advised libel action against art critic, John Ruskin, who has been less than complimentary about his work, falls out with the wealthy and influential Frederick Leyland over a room known as ‘The Peacock Room’ he has been commissioned to decorate, and is gulled by individuals he thought were friends but who turn out to be anything but. It’s a story of hubris in which you feel all along that things are not going to turn out well although, to a certain extent, you do have to admire someone whose overwhelming self-confidence enables them to view what anyone else would see as a disaster as a mere temporary setback. I’m afraid that was the only thing I found to admire about the James Whistler revealed in the book. Sure, he’s good company and hosts lavish parties but mostly using other people’s money. And he is completely self-centred. ‘Jim was not known for his perceptiveness when it came to the thoughts and feelings of others…’ Too right.

There’s really only one ‘official’ Mrs Whistler in the book, James’ mother, the subject of probably his most famous painting. Maud, the young woman who starts off as his model, then his muse and then his lover, never achieves that status. Maud has artistic talent of her own but is destined to remain in Whistler’s shadow, supporting him through one scrape after another, enduring the penury that follows the outcome of his disastrous libel action and putting up with his moods. ‘When in the dumps, he was but a husk – a despondent child, a tired old man.’ Time and again, I found myself thinking, ‘Maud why on earth are you with this man?’ particularly when she is forced to make an unbearably sad decision on not just one, but two occasions purely so Whistler’s artistic life can continue unimpeded.

It’s Maud who finally puts two and two together and discovers just how ruthlessly Whistler has been manipulated – and betrayed – by a person he thought his closest friend (although I suspect most readers will have had their doubts about them from early on).

The reader gets a fascinating insight into the artistic community of the period with walk-on parts for artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. There’s even an appearance towards the end of the book by Oscar Wilde (described as ‘a fleshy, rather flamboyant young Irishman’) who of course also embarked on an ill-fated libel action.

In the author’s Historical Note he references the biography of Whistler written by American art critic Elizabeth Pennell and her husband Joseph, published in 1911. He describes how, whilst writing the book, they felt certain details about Whistler’s life were missing. However, although Maud was still alive, she refused to talk to the Pennells. As they described it: ‘Maud could tell the whole story, but she will not.‘ Mrs Whistler is Matthew Plampin’s very engaging attempt to fill in the gaps in that story.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of The Borough Press via NetGalley.

In three words: Fascinating, moving, insightful

Try something similar: Ecstasy by Mary Sharratt

About the Author

Matthew Plampin was born in 1975 and lives in London. He completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art and now lectures on nineteenth-century art and architecture. He is the author of four other novels: The Street Philosopher, The Devil’s Acre, Illumination and Will & Tom. (Photo credit: Karolina Webb)

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