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
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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