Headlong Adventures in High Art
Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
Okay, this really has nothing to do with The Da Vinci Code except that it involves (round-about-ly) a museum employee and an art history puzzle. But not mentioning TDVC up front seemed like ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
I recently recommended a book to a friend of mine, a Taft Museum docent. "Recommended" is puttting it mildly--I pressed it on her and insisted she take it home. Fortunately she loved it, couldn't put it down. So I thought I'd see whether I can persuade any of you to take it home, too. It's one of my favorite novels, certainly one of my top two literary-puzzle-suspense-novels of all time. (The other one is A. S. Byatt's Possession.) It's Michael Frayn's Headlong, a dazzling art history thriller about a lost Bruegel painting. In addition to its truly nerve-wracking puzzle plot, it's a brilliant example of first-person narration. And it's positively stuffed with fascinating art history that passed even my friend's high standards. Academic research has never been so exciting.
Really.
Martin Clay is an academic married to an art historian. He has recently decided that he is something of an art scholar himself, and has manipulated his wife into moving out of London into a country cottage with their new baby so he can concentrate on his writing, which is naturally more important than hers. But having dinner with their new neighbors, local gentry of sorts, Martin spots a neglected painting that he is instantly convinced is a lost work of the great Flemish painter Bruegel. All thoughts of his earlier research vanish, and he becomes obsessed with secretly proving the provenance of the painting, reaping international acclaim for its discovery--and obtaining it for himself by whatever shady means necessary. But is he right? Or is he risking everything from his career to his marriage, not to mention a criminal conviction, on a fantasy?
Watching a true master at work is such a pleasure. Fans of sophisticated fiction will relish the panache with which novelist and dramatist Frayn handles his untrustworthy (and really rather nasty!) narrator, making the reader dislike him and yet get swept up sympathetically in his obsessive quest.
Headlong is not in the same genre of arcane thrillers as The Da Vinci Code, but it did make the art and literary puzzle-novel section of the read-alike/further reading lists we compiled for that novel in 2004.
