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Ghost Portrait
This intimate and compelling historical novel deftly interweaves three periods in the life of 17th-century painter Nathaniel in 1650, just after Charles I's execution, the young Deller joins a political group too radical even for the Roundheads; ten years later, on the night of Charles II's return from exile, Deller is accused by his former friend Thomas Digby of betraying their ideals; and in 1680, the increasingly blind painter commissions his former pupil William Stroud to finish the portrait of his late wife, knowing this could reignite the romance between Stroud and the daughter he tyrannises.
Offering a vivid picture of England spanning the English Civil War and Restoration, GHOST PORTRAIT explores the conflict between public duty and private desire, idealism and ambition.
Offering a vivid picture of England spanning the English Civil War and Restoration, GHOST PORTRAIT explores the conflict between public duty and private desire, idealism and ambition.
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First published January 1, 2005
22 people want to read
About the author
Gregory Norminton
25 books25 followersGregory Norminton is a writer and environmentalist born in Berkshire in 1976. Educated at Wellington College, he read English at Regent's Park College, Oxford and studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.He presently lives in Edinburgh.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 10, 2013
Published in the Book Review newspaper KNIZHNAYA VITRINA in October 2006
Elena Ksrpos-Dedukhina: What does the term ‘historical novelist’ mean to you? Is it a reputation or a label?
Gregory Norminton: The ‘historical novel’ is, more than anything, a marketing term. As such it is rather confining. I have written two novels set in the historical past: Arts and Wonders and Ghost Portrait. Though both touch on real events, the central characters are invented and their dilemmas apply equally to our own age. The Ship of Fools is a fantasy, or set of fantasies, inspired by the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. Anybody hoping to learn about life in Medieval Flanders will find it a most frustrating read.
If the term ‘historical novel’ means anything, it is the fictionalised account of historical fact. I am not in that business. My current project is set in contemporary Britain, while a future novel (if I ever manage to write it) imagines a trip into outer space. My short stories include what marketing types would call ‘speculative’ and ‘historical’ fiction, as well as ‘horror’ and more conventionally ‘realistic’ narratives. The problem is that publishers need to define an author, to market a ‘product’ rather than facilitate the expression of an imagination. So labels are imposed and those who refuse them are kept in obscurity. Contemporary writers I most admire flit between genres and resolutely ignore that grim dictum (the ‘socialist realism’ of a narcissistic and confessional culture) only to write from direct experience.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: You said in one of your interviews that ‘getting reviews for fiction is becoming increasingly difficult.’ Does it mean that the art of criticism is generally disappearing or that you personally lack attention towards your work?
Gregory Norminton:: The sale of a book is to a large degree determined by the number of reviews it receives. My third novel was barely reviewed and its sales have been dismal as a result, even though I consider it my best work. But this is not just a personal gripe. The majority of writers in Britain work in relative or total obscurity, and the sheer volume of books published annually ensures that only a minority will see their work reviewed. At the same time, there appears to be a growing trend for reviewing non-fiction over fiction. Newspapers are in the business of fact and interpretation; they are not over-concerned with works of the imagination.
The art of criticism is not dead, for all that. But it is increasingly confined to specialist publications. This means that fiction has a diminishing profile in the mainstream media and only a small number of titles (winners of literary awards or the beneficiaries of expensive marketing campaigns) find a readership. Perhaps the growth of online magazines, reader forums and (in the real world) reading groups will rescue us from this law of diminishing returns? I, for one, long to find ways of finding an audience without the costly mediation of marketing people.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: In your first novel, The Ship of Fools, you offer your own interpretation of the famous Bosch painting, whereas in Ghost Portrait the narration itself offers such vivid descriptions of Nature (mainly) that one might assume you are a landscape painter at heart yourself.
Gregory Norminton:: I regard my first three novels as a kind of trilogy, with painting as the uniting theme. The Ship of Fools pays homage to Bosch and Bruegel: characters from their work are given life, so to speak, on the page. At the same time, as an affirmation of creative freedom, I wanted to go back to the prehistory of the novel and so Rabelais plays an important part, along with English writers such as Swift and Lawrence Sterne: experimenters who played with and invented a new form. Ghost Portrait was a very different enterprise. Like Arts and Wonders, it has painting and painters at its centre. Whereas The Ship of Fools is hermetic and ‘artificial’, an intertextual game, Ghost Portrait is a naturalistic work, an intimate portrayal of long dead people. It marks my return to England and to a tradition, present in art and music as well as literature, of celebrating the English landscape. It is a rural novel. It is about sight and perception. It is also about the sense of place: how one house can be many houses over time, experienced anew by each inhabitant. Fools sprang from books and paintings, Ghost Portrait from explorations of the North Downs – that narrow vein of chalk hills in the south-eastern county of Kent. Nathaniel Deller’s home is a composite of actual country houses; a close relative of William Stroud’s post-mill still stands in east Surrey. As for the revolutionary Diggers, they did indeed attempt to create a colony on an area of heath quite near my childhood home. I was, then, writing about landscapes that I knew intimately. For that reason Ghost Portrait is a very ‘personal’ novel, even if it set three centuries before my birth.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: ‘Failure, though it doesn’t pay the bills, can be an effective tutor.’ You wrote this about the novel you abandoned for being ‘lacklustre and directionless’. Was this the first time such a thing has happened to you? What did you learn from that ‘tutor’? Have you any intention of going back to that unfinished work one day?
Gregory Norminton: I had been working on a comic novel set on an American campus at the height of the present Bush administration. It was going to be based, very loosely, on my own experience of living in Iowa City for six months between 2003 and 2004. I wanted to capture something of that (to me) very foreign country where in theory my own language is spoken. After working on the project for about nine months, however, it became quite obvious that, though I had a setting, I did not have a novel. Many minor characters had the stamp of life about them but there was a gaping hole where the central narrator ought to have been. To work successfully, over months and months, on a novel one has to really need to write it. I made the decision to abandon a project that somehow lacked that life force.
It was the first time I had met with such a failure. The experience was oddly bracing, for it taught me viscerally what I should have known about inspiration and compulsion. If you are trying to earn a living from fiction, the necessity to churn out material can be detrimental to good writing. By going astray, you become acquainted with the path you should follow.
All was not lost, mind you, from the abandoned work. I managed to rescue a section which, substantially reshaped, became a long short story called ‘In Refugium’. It has not yet found a publisher.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: ‘Increasingly,’ you have written, ‘short stories are where my enthusiasm lies, both as reader and writer.’ Why?
Gregory Norminton: I wonder at the decline of the short story in Britain, for it seems to me the perfect narrative form for our age: a fictional package fully digestible in one sitting. The short story, by its brevity, allows us to be promiscuous readers. A good collection (in which each is piece is autonomous yet belongs with its neighbours) takes us through time and space. Yet the proverbial shopper will wrinkle his or her nose at a volume of stories and buy instead some breezeblock of a novel. Madness! It’s buying one story for the price of twelve.
Producing a novel consumes vast amounts of time and anxiety; so writing a short story can seem, at best, a sort of working holiday. Forget stamina: what’s required is precision and concision, the rice sculptor’s steady hand, if you will, and the clockmaker’s squint.
The status of the short story is a wretched one in Britain. Is this because our writers can’t manage the demands of the form? I don’t believe it. The truth is that we are no longer accustomed to reading stories. They have largely disappeared from newspapers and magazine. Until they return to mainstream culture, the passion for short stories will continue to wane; and readers may never discover the speculative fictions of Borges and Ballard, the dark confections of Poe and Angela Carter, or the luminous humanity of Katherine Mansfield.
For my favourites I choose Kipling, V.S. Pritchett (the closest we get to Chekhov?) and Samuel Beckett. Only in Kim does Kipling equal the genius of ‘They’ or ‘The Church that was in Antioch’. Kim of course is greater but only the stories approach perfection. As for Beckett, neither his Trilogy nor his late, negative-knotted exercises offer the compelling cadences and despairing comedy of ‘First Love’ and his three ‘novellas’.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: What annoys you most in British contemporary literature? In American? In any other?
Gregory Norminton: I resent the distortions of hype, the banality of ‘relevance’ and the poison of sentimentality. I fear the relentless push of commercialism with its antipathy towards the unusual and the eccentric. I think the best writing in the USA comes from small, independent publishers. In the UK, the disappearance of independent bookshops is a cultural disaster. We also publish too few books in translation.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: Could you name the authors and books you have recently read? How do you choose the books you think you ought to read?
Gregory Norminton: I am an avid reader, and a greedy accumulator of books. My reading is rarely planned or schematic: I just go where curiosity, or the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, leads me. Recently, having moved to Scotland, I have been reading contemporary Scottish writers such as James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy and the great, eccentric visionary Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark I cannot recommend too highly. I hope it is available in Russian translation. Fiction is not my only interest. I read books on natural history and the environment, works of history (often following particular obsessions: last year, the Soviet gulags, this year the disgraceful conduct of the West in the Middle East) and quite a lot of poetry. Perhaps I should be a more disciplined reader: I tend to have several books on the go at any one time.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: Do you normally attend book festivals? What do they mean to you? Why do you think more and more readers each year flock to book fairs and festivals?
Gregory Norminton: I would love to attend more book festivals: it’s the frustrated actor in me. I really enjoy reading my own work. Unfortunately having a low profile in Britain means that I rarely get the opportunity. I do occasionally go as an audience member (living in Edinburgh enables me to attend the Book Festival in August) but must confess that, unless the writer has a real talent for reading her work, I often end up regretting the experience. On the other hand, festivals are proof of a literary appetite and testify to a strange public curiosity concerning the shape and sound of authors. People who attend such events want to make a connection with the frail or fallible human being who happens to have written a book. For the author who fills the tent or theatre, the size of the audience testifies to the health of his talent.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: You took part in all kinds of projects for the television series, Planet Action. What does it mean to you?
Gregory Norminton: Planet Action is a six-part television series, broadcast around the world on the Animal Planet channel, in which seven volunteers travel to different, tropical locations to work on conservation projects with the WWF. A lifelong supporter of the WWF (a remarkable organisation I would urge everyone to join), I auditioned on a whim for a part in the series and, to my great surprise, was selected in May 2005. Eight weeks of sweating adventures followed: fitting satellite transmitters on leatherback turtles in Panama, studying coral reef ecology in Belize, restoring degraded forest in Borneo, creating an eco-tourist adventure to safeguard a patch of Malaysian jungle, building a tiger-proof paddock in Kelantan, and helping to save the dismally rare Irrawaddy dolphin in the Cambodian Mekong. As this list suggests, the whole experience was remarkable – a unique opportunity to see parts of our endangered planet and to do something to raise awareness of our ecological crisis. I have long been an environmentalist (show me another planet we can live on) but my experiences last year have strengthened my conviction that writers have a particular duty to address the greatest challenge of our time: learning to live in a sustainable way on a fragile and finite Earth.
Copyright © Elena Karpos-Dedukhina 2006
Copyright © Gregory Norminton 2006
Elena Ksrpos-Dedukhina: What does the term ‘historical novelist’ mean to you? Is it a reputation or a label?
Gregory Norminton: The ‘historical novel’ is, more than anything, a marketing term. As such it is rather confining. I have written two novels set in the historical past: Arts and Wonders and Ghost Portrait. Though both touch on real events, the central characters are invented and their dilemmas apply equally to our own age. The Ship of Fools is a fantasy, or set of fantasies, inspired by the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. Anybody hoping to learn about life in Medieval Flanders will find it a most frustrating read.
If the term ‘historical novel’ means anything, it is the fictionalised account of historical fact. I am not in that business. My current project is set in contemporary Britain, while a future novel (if I ever manage to write it) imagines a trip into outer space. My short stories include what marketing types would call ‘speculative’ and ‘historical’ fiction, as well as ‘horror’ and more conventionally ‘realistic’ narratives. The problem is that publishers need to define an author, to market a ‘product’ rather than facilitate the expression of an imagination. So labels are imposed and those who refuse them are kept in obscurity. Contemporary writers I most admire flit between genres and resolutely ignore that grim dictum (the ‘socialist realism’ of a narcissistic and confessional culture) only to write from direct experience.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: You said in one of your interviews that ‘getting reviews for fiction is becoming increasingly difficult.’ Does it mean that the art of criticism is generally disappearing or that you personally lack attention towards your work?
Gregory Norminton:: The sale of a book is to a large degree determined by the number of reviews it receives. My third novel was barely reviewed and its sales have been dismal as a result, even though I consider it my best work. But this is not just a personal gripe. The majority of writers in Britain work in relative or total obscurity, and the sheer volume of books published annually ensures that only a minority will see their work reviewed. At the same time, there appears to be a growing trend for reviewing non-fiction over fiction. Newspapers are in the business of fact and interpretation; they are not over-concerned with works of the imagination.
The art of criticism is not dead, for all that. But it is increasingly confined to specialist publications. This means that fiction has a diminishing profile in the mainstream media and only a small number of titles (winners of literary awards or the beneficiaries of expensive marketing campaigns) find a readership. Perhaps the growth of online magazines, reader forums and (in the real world) reading groups will rescue us from this law of diminishing returns? I, for one, long to find ways of finding an audience without the costly mediation of marketing people.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: In your first novel, The Ship of Fools, you offer your own interpretation of the famous Bosch painting, whereas in Ghost Portrait the narration itself offers such vivid descriptions of Nature (mainly) that one might assume you are a landscape painter at heart yourself.
Gregory Norminton:: I regard my first three novels as a kind of trilogy, with painting as the uniting theme. The Ship of Fools pays homage to Bosch and Bruegel: characters from their work are given life, so to speak, on the page. At the same time, as an affirmation of creative freedom, I wanted to go back to the prehistory of the novel and so Rabelais plays an important part, along with English writers such as Swift and Lawrence Sterne: experimenters who played with and invented a new form. Ghost Portrait was a very different enterprise. Like Arts and Wonders, it has painting and painters at its centre. Whereas The Ship of Fools is hermetic and ‘artificial’, an intertextual game, Ghost Portrait is a naturalistic work, an intimate portrayal of long dead people. It marks my return to England and to a tradition, present in art and music as well as literature, of celebrating the English landscape. It is a rural novel. It is about sight and perception. It is also about the sense of place: how one house can be many houses over time, experienced anew by each inhabitant. Fools sprang from books and paintings, Ghost Portrait from explorations of the North Downs – that narrow vein of chalk hills in the south-eastern county of Kent. Nathaniel Deller’s home is a composite of actual country houses; a close relative of William Stroud’s post-mill still stands in east Surrey. As for the revolutionary Diggers, they did indeed attempt to create a colony on an area of heath quite near my childhood home. I was, then, writing about landscapes that I knew intimately. For that reason Ghost Portrait is a very ‘personal’ novel, even if it set three centuries before my birth.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: ‘Failure, though it doesn’t pay the bills, can be an effective tutor.’ You wrote this about the novel you abandoned for being ‘lacklustre and directionless’. Was this the first time such a thing has happened to you? What did you learn from that ‘tutor’? Have you any intention of going back to that unfinished work one day?
Gregory Norminton: I had been working on a comic novel set on an American campus at the height of the present Bush administration. It was going to be based, very loosely, on my own experience of living in Iowa City for six months between 2003 and 2004. I wanted to capture something of that (to me) very foreign country where in theory my own language is spoken. After working on the project for about nine months, however, it became quite obvious that, though I had a setting, I did not have a novel. Many minor characters had the stamp of life about them but there was a gaping hole where the central narrator ought to have been. To work successfully, over months and months, on a novel one has to really need to write it. I made the decision to abandon a project that somehow lacked that life force.
It was the first time I had met with such a failure. The experience was oddly bracing, for it taught me viscerally what I should have known about inspiration and compulsion. If you are trying to earn a living from fiction, the necessity to churn out material can be detrimental to good writing. By going astray, you become acquainted with the path you should follow.
All was not lost, mind you, from the abandoned work. I managed to rescue a section which, substantially reshaped, became a long short story called ‘In Refugium’. It has not yet found a publisher.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: ‘Increasingly,’ you have written, ‘short stories are where my enthusiasm lies, both as reader and writer.’ Why?
Gregory Norminton: I wonder at the decline of the short story in Britain, for it seems to me the perfect narrative form for our age: a fictional package fully digestible in one sitting. The short story, by its brevity, allows us to be promiscuous readers. A good collection (in which each is piece is autonomous yet belongs with its neighbours) takes us through time and space. Yet the proverbial shopper will wrinkle his or her nose at a volume of stories and buy instead some breezeblock of a novel. Madness! It’s buying one story for the price of twelve.
Producing a novel consumes vast amounts of time and anxiety; so writing a short story can seem, at best, a sort of working holiday. Forget stamina: what’s required is precision and concision, the rice sculptor’s steady hand, if you will, and the clockmaker’s squint.
The status of the short story is a wretched one in Britain. Is this because our writers can’t manage the demands of the form? I don’t believe it. The truth is that we are no longer accustomed to reading stories. They have largely disappeared from newspapers and magazine. Until they return to mainstream culture, the passion for short stories will continue to wane; and readers may never discover the speculative fictions of Borges and Ballard, the dark confections of Poe and Angela Carter, or the luminous humanity of Katherine Mansfield.
For my favourites I choose Kipling, V.S. Pritchett (the closest we get to Chekhov?) and Samuel Beckett. Only in Kim does Kipling equal the genius of ‘They’ or ‘The Church that was in Antioch’. Kim of course is greater but only the stories approach perfection. As for Beckett, neither his Trilogy nor his late, negative-knotted exercises offer the compelling cadences and despairing comedy of ‘First Love’ and his three ‘novellas’.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: What annoys you most in British contemporary literature? In American? In any other?
Gregory Norminton: I resent the distortions of hype, the banality of ‘relevance’ and the poison of sentimentality. I fear the relentless push of commercialism with its antipathy towards the unusual and the eccentric. I think the best writing in the USA comes from small, independent publishers. In the UK, the disappearance of independent bookshops is a cultural disaster. We also publish too few books in translation.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: Could you name the authors and books you have recently read? How do you choose the books you think you ought to read?
Gregory Norminton: I am an avid reader, and a greedy accumulator of books. My reading is rarely planned or schematic: I just go where curiosity, or the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, leads me. Recently, having moved to Scotland, I have been reading contemporary Scottish writers such as James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy and the great, eccentric visionary Alasdair Gray, whose novel Lanark I cannot recommend too highly. I hope it is available in Russian translation. Fiction is not my only interest. I read books on natural history and the environment, works of history (often following particular obsessions: last year, the Soviet gulags, this year the disgraceful conduct of the West in the Middle East) and quite a lot of poetry. Perhaps I should be a more disciplined reader: I tend to have several books on the go at any one time.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: Do you normally attend book festivals? What do they mean to you? Why do you think more and more readers each year flock to book fairs and festivals?
Gregory Norminton: I would love to attend more book festivals: it’s the frustrated actor in me. I really enjoy reading my own work. Unfortunately having a low profile in Britain means that I rarely get the opportunity. I do occasionally go as an audience member (living in Edinburgh enables me to attend the Book Festival in August) but must confess that, unless the writer has a real talent for reading her work, I often end up regretting the experience. On the other hand, festivals are proof of a literary appetite and testify to a strange public curiosity concerning the shape and sound of authors. People who attend such events want to make a connection with the frail or fallible human being who happens to have written a book. For the author who fills the tent or theatre, the size of the audience testifies to the health of his talent.
Elena Karpos-Dedukhina: You took part in all kinds of projects for the television series, Planet Action. What does it mean to you?
Gregory Norminton: Planet Action is a six-part television series, broadcast around the world on the Animal Planet channel, in which seven volunteers travel to different, tropical locations to work on conservation projects with the WWF. A lifelong supporter of the WWF (a remarkable organisation I would urge everyone to join), I auditioned on a whim for a part in the series and, to my great surprise, was selected in May 2005. Eight weeks of sweating adventures followed: fitting satellite transmitters on leatherback turtles in Panama, studying coral reef ecology in Belize, restoring degraded forest in Borneo, creating an eco-tourist adventure to safeguard a patch of Malaysian jungle, building a tiger-proof paddock in Kelantan, and helping to save the dismally rare Irrawaddy dolphin in the Cambodian Mekong. As this list suggests, the whole experience was remarkable – a unique opportunity to see parts of our endangered planet and to do something to raise awareness of our ecological crisis. I have long been an environmentalist (show me another planet we can live on) but my experiences last year have strengthened my conviction that writers have a particular duty to address the greatest challenge of our time: learning to live in a sustainable way on a fragile and finite Earth.
Copyright © Elena Karpos-Dedukhina 2006
Copyright © Gregory Norminton 2006
July 11, 2010
Ghost Portrait- Gregory Norminton
It was the antique beauty of the cover that drew me to the hardback charmer- Ghost Portrait.
Set in the 16th century, this small novel about a blind painter and his student at first riddled me. After giving it deep thought, I decided to press on through the dry reading and give the novel a worthy read. The outcome of the journey varied in opinions based on style, era and the ability the novel had to capture my attention and hold it long enough for me to grasp the concept of the story.
To me Gregory's style was like a detailed skeleton without any real flesh. Beautifully written, without a doubt, but most definitely not my cup of tea. I did enjoy it during some stages, but the constant change of time and character made is confusing in parts to keep up with what the story was about.
I enjoyed reading about Cynthia and the heavily pregnant wife of the painter -Belinda, whose portrait the story revolves around when Nathaniel [The Painter:] asks his [Student:] William if he would continue his portrait after his death, in return for Nathaniel's Daughter Cynthia.
Reading about Cynthia helped me determine the story and let me breathe through the sometimes heavy passages of old historical language that I, as a modern day reader have never heard of, nor thought of learning.
Much as in life, I have learned tid-bits of historical information about the 16th century that I was not aware of. Such as, reading and learning were forbidden to women and that the women's domain was a kitchen and that toilet paper was often pieces of fabric that was rinsed and washed under a sink after use.
For a diverse read in a different style I would suggest picking up this book and giving it a go. It does deserve the read, dispite my previous inkling that I wasn't going to be able to read through till the end. I believe this book would be wonderfully suited to those with knowledge of the 16th century or fans of that historical genre.
Overall I'm giving this book two stars, maybe verging on a three ** - *** stars.
It was the antique beauty of the cover that drew me to the hardback charmer- Ghost Portrait.
Set in the 16th century, this small novel about a blind painter and his student at first riddled me. After giving it deep thought, I decided to press on through the dry reading and give the novel a worthy read. The outcome of the journey varied in opinions based on style, era and the ability the novel had to capture my attention and hold it long enough for me to grasp the concept of the story.
To me Gregory's style was like a detailed skeleton without any real flesh. Beautifully written, without a doubt, but most definitely not my cup of tea. I did enjoy it during some stages, but the constant change of time and character made is confusing in parts to keep up with what the story was about.
I enjoyed reading about Cynthia and the heavily pregnant wife of the painter -Belinda, whose portrait the story revolves around when Nathaniel [The Painter:] asks his [Student:] William if he would continue his portrait after his death, in return for Nathaniel's Daughter Cynthia.
Reading about Cynthia helped me determine the story and let me breathe through the sometimes heavy passages of old historical language that I, as a modern day reader have never heard of, nor thought of learning.
Much as in life, I have learned tid-bits of historical information about the 16th century that I was not aware of. Such as, reading and learning were forbidden to women and that the women's domain was a kitchen and that toilet paper was often pieces of fabric that was rinsed and washed under a sink after use.
For a diverse read in a different style I would suggest picking up this book and giving it a go. It does deserve the read, dispite my previous inkling that I wasn't going to be able to read through till the end. I believe this book would be wonderfully suited to those with knowledge of the 16th century or fans of that historical genre.
Overall I'm giving this book two stars, maybe verging on a three ** - *** stars.
January 10, 2009
A while back I did something for an internet friend in London. Her response, which went entirely above and beyond my meager help, was to send me a wonderful care package of books and chocolates and all sorts of lovley things to help make me soft and silky and make my bath bubble lushly ;-) This book was part of the bounty.
I'd not heard of this book before Madeline sent it to me. It takes place in 17th century England and spans the Civil War, Cromwell's reign and the Restoration. In a sense it is like getting three tales in one because of the three stories told, all involving painter Nathaniel Deller. The story starts out with Nathaniel, now blind, summoning his former pupil William Stroud, to finish a portrait Nathaniel started of his long-dead wife. If William finishes it, Nathaniel indicates that William may once again look with love and win Nathaniel's daughter Cynthia (who lives with and cares for her father, trapped in the dark and stern household.) Interwoven are stories from two other time periods of Deller's life-- The night of Charles ll's return from exile in 1660, when Deller is accused by his former friend Thomas Digby of betraying their ideals and 10 years earlier just after Charles l's execution when the young Deller had joined a political group too radical even for the Roundheads.
It is a small book and a rapid read, but as I started it late at night, I was glad for the dates at the headings of the chapters to help guide my brain through the time periods. I admit that the concept most fascinating was of Deller guiding Stroud how to complete the painting of a subject he could see so clearly in his head that Stroud had never seen. And how to judge the complete work, when there was no one alive who had seen the deceased Belinda alive.
PS I got to be the first reviewer on Amazon and the first registered copy on BookCrossing!
I'd not heard of this book before Madeline sent it to me. It takes place in 17th century England and spans the Civil War, Cromwell's reign and the Restoration. In a sense it is like getting three tales in one because of the three stories told, all involving painter Nathaniel Deller. The story starts out with Nathaniel, now blind, summoning his former pupil William Stroud, to finish a portrait Nathaniel started of his long-dead wife. If William finishes it, Nathaniel indicates that William may once again look with love and win Nathaniel's daughter Cynthia (who lives with and cares for her father, trapped in the dark and stern household.) Interwoven are stories from two other time periods of Deller's life-- The night of Charles ll's return from exile in 1660, when Deller is accused by his former friend Thomas Digby of betraying their ideals and 10 years earlier just after Charles l's execution when the young Deller had joined a political group too radical even for the Roundheads.
It is a small book and a rapid read, but as I started it late at night, I was glad for the dates at the headings of the chapters to help guide my brain through the time periods. I admit that the concept most fascinating was of Deller guiding Stroud how to complete the painting of a subject he could see so clearly in his head that Stroud had never seen. And how to judge the complete work, when there was no one alive who had seen the deceased Belinda alive.
PS I got to be the first reviewer on Amazon and the first registered copy on BookCrossing!
October 30, 2012
тоже про Кромвеля, только про другого
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