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The Woman in the Picture
On his return to Britain after the First World War, Henry Whitaker begins his career as a film-maker - first as assistant to the legendary director Arthur Maxted, and then as one of the country's foremost documentary-makers. But all the while he yearns to create a feature film of his own - a work of art that will give his life meaning.
Interwoven with Henry's narrative is the present-day quest of his daughter, Miranda, to understand what happened to her mother, a refugee Henry met and married in Germany at the end of the war. Did Henry - as his daughter has always supposed - drive Romana to suicide? Or do Miranda's half-repressed childhood memories hint at an altogether more complex and extraordinary truth?
Interwoven with Henry's narrative is the present-day quest of his daughter, Miranda, to understand what happened to her mother, a refugee Henry met and married in Germany at the end of the war. Did Henry - as his daughter has always supposed - drive Romana to suicide? Or do Miranda's half-repressed childhood memories hint at an altogether more complex and extraordinary truth?
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
29 people want to read
About the author
James Wilson
11 books23 followersJAMES WILSON was born and brought up near Cambridge, and studied History at Oxford University. He now divides his time between London and France.
In 1975 James received a Ford Foundation grant to research and write The Original Americans: US Indians, for the Minority Rights in London. Over the next twenty-five years he travelled widely in the US and Canada, working on – among other projects – a number of radio and TV documentaries, including the award-winning Savagery and the American Indian and The Two Worlds of the Innu, both for the BBC. His critically-acclaimed history of Native Americans, The Earth Shall Weep, was published by Picador in the UK in 1998, and by Grove/Atlantic in the US the following year. In 2000, it won a Myers Outstanding Book award. James continues to serve as a member of the executive committee of Survival, an international organization campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide.
James is the author of four novels, all published by Faber & Faber: The Dark Clue (described by Allan Massie in The Scotsman as ‘wonderfully entertaining’, and by The Washington Post as ‘a stunning first novel’); The Bastard Boy (longlisted for the IMPAC Award); The Woman in the Picture (‘multi-layered, deeply absorbing and entertaining’ – The Times; ‘A superb achievement’ – Kevin Brownlow); and Consolation (‘an animated, haunting and surprisingly uplifting novel’ – The Observer).
A fifth novel, The Summer of Broken Stories, will be published by Alma Books in April 2015.
You can visit James online at jameswilsonauthor.com, and on Twitter at @jcwilsonauthor.
In 1975 James received a Ford Foundation grant to research and write The Original Americans: US Indians, for the Minority Rights in London. Over the next twenty-five years he travelled widely in the US and Canada, working on – among other projects – a number of radio and TV documentaries, including the award-winning Savagery and the American Indian and The Two Worlds of the Innu, both for the BBC. His critically-acclaimed history of Native Americans, The Earth Shall Weep, was published by Picador in the UK in 1998, and by Grove/Atlantic in the US the following year. In 2000, it won a Myers Outstanding Book award. James continues to serve as a member of the executive committee of Survival, an international organization campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide.
James is the author of four novels, all published by Faber & Faber: The Dark Clue (described by Allan Massie in The Scotsman as ‘wonderfully entertaining’, and by The Washington Post as ‘a stunning first novel’); The Bastard Boy (longlisted for the IMPAC Award); The Woman in the Picture (‘multi-layered, deeply absorbing and entertaining’ – The Times; ‘A superb achievement’ – Kevin Brownlow); and Consolation (‘an animated, haunting and surprisingly uplifting novel’ – The Observer).
A fifth novel, The Summer of Broken Stories, will be published by Alma Books in April 2015.
You can visit James online at jameswilsonauthor.com, and on Twitter at @jcwilsonauthor.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 12, 2019
“The Woman in the Picture” is so multi-layered that it took me virtually the whole book to grasp the implications behind the title of this marvellous novel. The reader is swept along by the mystery straight away. English filmmaker Henry Whitaker is trying to locate the woman in a photograph he now possesses. The photograph of a girl and a letter from her to her fiancee who shot dead Henry’s father in WWI. His companion Captain Smith shoots dead the German and gives the dead German’s field glasses containing both the photograph and letter to Henry, still a child after WWI.
The challenge of this novel (for this reader anyway) is not so much the more recent timeline involving Henry’s daughter Miranda who has never understood her father. This timeline I really enjoyed as she gradually finds out more about what drove him. Instead it is the way we only catch a ‘close-up’ of Henry’s life every two years or so. We can see the challenges and restrictions to his idea of portraying art in British cinema during the inter-war years but we often pick Henry up again midstream which can be very confusing.
I was often left wondering who are these people and what is he working on now? What happened to his previous movie, although I know this is exactly how life is. It picks us up and drops us down, sometimes in a heap.
Two years might have passed but we are suddenly in the middle of a new project. What is constant is Miss Weedon, the secretary of Arthur Maxted’s (Henry’s boss) who is obviously infatuated with Henry. Circumstances throw them together and other circumstances, strange synchronicities threaten to derail Henry’s life and career. Yet somehow he battles on and all the while it is impossible to put the book down.
Germany after the war is captured evocatively:
“In the main street, the breeze feels fresher and you can hear the distant zizz of a big city waking up. After three weeks of seeing nothing beyond the studio and the hotel and the short journey between the, I’d almost forgotten I was in a big city. The sulphurous air is tinged with the smell of roasting coffee and hot bread and sweet pastry. It makes my mouth weep with hunger - not only for food and warmth, but for the promise of the day ahead. No script; no schedule; no sulky Max; no actors’ temperaments; no having to goad them back to work after lunch with their bellies full of suet and cabbage: just, for one, an unfilled page, waiting to be drawn on.”
And then whilst scouting for a film location Henry comes across Herman Street. Hermann Strasse was where he found the girl in the photograph:
“Herman Street. Herman Strasse. The association give me an odd fluttery thrill. I tease myself: Go down Herman Street, and who knows where it’ll take you? To Irma Brucke again? or to some other encounter you’ll never be able to tell anyone about?”
“I go down Herman Street. At the far end looms another part of the gigantic liner, linked to the squalid, everyday, human-scale world only by a spindly gang-plank running from the promenade deck to the quay. The sight of it sends the same adolescent shiver through me that I felt going down into the tube this morning. On my neck, suddenly, I sense the weight of the life I’ve started to make for myself - a knobbly shell, I visualise it as, or else a dimly lit, over-stuffed room full of bulbous shapes that have to be negotiated, reducing every movement to no more than a nudge.”
And so Henry fights to stay true to himself and the “woman in the picture” (don’t presume there is only one) just as his daughter begins to find out more about her father. Highly recommended for those who like to be tested in their reading.
The challenge of this novel (for this reader anyway) is not so much the more recent timeline involving Henry’s daughter Miranda who has never understood her father. This timeline I really enjoyed as she gradually finds out more about what drove him. Instead it is the way we only catch a ‘close-up’ of Henry’s life every two years or so. We can see the challenges and restrictions to his idea of portraying art in British cinema during the inter-war years but we often pick Henry up again midstream which can be very confusing.
I was often left wondering who are these people and what is he working on now? What happened to his previous movie, although I know this is exactly how life is. It picks us up and drops us down, sometimes in a heap.
Two years might have passed but we are suddenly in the middle of a new project. What is constant is Miss Weedon, the secretary of Arthur Maxted’s (Henry’s boss) who is obviously infatuated with Henry. Circumstances throw them together and other circumstances, strange synchronicities threaten to derail Henry’s life and career. Yet somehow he battles on and all the while it is impossible to put the book down.
Germany after the war is captured evocatively:
“In the main street, the breeze feels fresher and you can hear the distant zizz of a big city waking up. After three weeks of seeing nothing beyond the studio and the hotel and the short journey between the, I’d almost forgotten I was in a big city. The sulphurous air is tinged with the smell of roasting coffee and hot bread and sweet pastry. It makes my mouth weep with hunger - not only for food and warmth, but for the promise of the day ahead. No script; no schedule; no sulky Max; no actors’ temperaments; no having to goad them back to work after lunch with their bellies full of suet and cabbage: just, for one, an unfilled page, waiting to be drawn on.”
And then whilst scouting for a film location Henry comes across Herman Street. Hermann Strasse was where he found the girl in the photograph:
“Herman Street. Herman Strasse. The association give me an odd fluttery thrill. I tease myself: Go down Herman Street, and who knows where it’ll take you? To Irma Brucke again? or to some other encounter you’ll never be able to tell anyone about?”
“I go down Herman Street. At the far end looms another part of the gigantic liner, linked to the squalid, everyday, human-scale world only by a spindly gang-plank running from the promenade deck to the quay. The sight of it sends the same adolescent shiver through me that I felt going down into the tube this morning. On my neck, suddenly, I sense the weight of the life I’ve started to make for myself - a knobbly shell, I visualise it as, or else a dimly lit, over-stuffed room full of bulbous shapes that have to be negotiated, reducing every movement to no more than a nudge.”
And so Henry fights to stay true to himself and the “woman in the picture” (don’t presume there is only one) just as his daughter begins to find out more about her father. Highly recommended for those who like to be tested in their reading.
May 18, 2012
I started this book with some trepidation, based on the poor reviews it received from my fellow GoodReaders, but it turns out that I needn't of worried. The Woman in the Picture was exactly my kind of book, and I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next.
Henry Whitaker is an aspiring filmmaker. Something happened when he was a child that has colored the rest of his life's experiences, for good or ill. A second thread in the story, interspersed with his own, is that of his daughter, Miranda, who comes to know more about her father's life before she was a part of it.
The fascinating thing about The Woman in the Picture, for me, is that it illustrates what I've experienced in my own life. Most of the important events in our life rest on coincidence and chance. If we had looked left instead of right at that stoplight, we might not have seen the person who became the love of our life. If we had said this instead of that, we might not have ended up in the career we currently have. James Wilson takes this premise and uses it to create a compelling story. He expects us to remember what we've read, because we'll probably need it later, and he expects us to fill in some blanks on our own. It's not necessarily an "easy" read, but a rewarding one.
The discussions of Surrealism went on far too long for my taste, and there is some rather silly dithering over an aspect of Henry's character, but otherwise I found The Woman in the Picture to be well worth my time.
Henry Whitaker is an aspiring filmmaker. Something happened when he was a child that has colored the rest of his life's experiences, for good or ill. A second thread in the story, interspersed with his own, is that of his daughter, Miranda, who comes to know more about her father's life before she was a part of it.
The fascinating thing about The Woman in the Picture, for me, is that it illustrates what I've experienced in my own life. Most of the important events in our life rest on coincidence and chance. If we had looked left instead of right at that stoplight, we might not have seen the person who became the love of our life. If we had said this instead of that, we might not have ended up in the career we currently have. James Wilson takes this premise and uses it to create a compelling story. He expects us to remember what we've read, because we'll probably need it later, and he expects us to fill in some blanks on our own. It's not necessarily an "easy" read, but a rewarding one.
The discussions of Surrealism went on far too long for my taste, and there is some rather silly dithering over an aspect of Henry's character, but otherwise I found The Woman in the Picture to be well worth my time.
July 8, 2013
I'd read James Wilson's two earlier books, set in the 18th and 19th centuries - and imagined him to be a writer whose natural bent was for turnpikes and gaslamps. But this book could not be more 20th century in its themes, its characters and its style. It paints a wide-eyed, innocent picture of the British film industry between the Wars. The way that the narrative suggests the darker side of this world, and presents the growing poverty & desperation that surrounds it, is masterly. But what fuels the book is not a portrait of politics or documentary fol-making, but an exploration of obsession. The documentary camera never lies, it seems - but, against a background of the dislocations of surrealism, our hero finds himself at the mercy of something that defies logic. A moment, a reality, that he has caught on film, pursues him and enslaves him - and suddenly the cool control & mastery of the director's eye is reduced to abject obsession. This development caught me so completely it literally took my breath away - and in fact I had to reread the book immediately to experience again that terrible moment when everything we know & depend on is turned upside down and the unleashed forces of surrealism subvert the known world.....
May 28, 2012
I'm finished as in, I'm finished with bothering with this book. I read 50 pages and just could not get into it. I can't say I don't recommend this as it is all down to taste but definately not for me. It did not seem well written or of any interest, in my opinion.
October 27, 2010
I really couldn't get on with this book. It seemed disjointed and slow. I gave up in the end.
October 14, 2011
Confusing and tedious.
March 31, 2013
When I started reading this book, I liked it immediately. A romantic mystery, set in the inter-war years....what's not to like? Then, I must say, that I found myself a little lost.....and I never quite found myself again. There are a lot of characters in this book, and even after finishing it, I still couldn't figure out how or where half of the characters came from. Somewhere around the middle of the book, they just didn't hold my attention long enough to concentrate. I think the problem lies within the way the story immediately starts to inexplicably changes from one narrative to another. It becomes clear further on in the book, why this is happening. However, I was confused for a good while there, and it left me feeling a little disinterested and detached.
In a strange way however, I still enjoyed this book. Whilst normally I might get frustrated with being confused about what is happening in a story, I decided to just run with it, and 'feel' what the message of the story was, rather than understand all the in's and out's. And what I was left with, was a poignant story that left me with a lot of questions. What is the 'story of my life' that I tell myself? How does this 'story' impact on my decisions and how I live my life? Is the 'story of my life', even accurate or true? Is accuracy or truth possible? And what secrets do we hide from ourselves or others, that dictate our ultimate outcome?
As a story in itself, I found it rather hard to follow and there were definite gaps (or at least, connections that I failed to make!). However, I really enjoyed the philosophy behind what I think the author was trying to get at, and that is why I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
In a strange way however, I still enjoyed this book. Whilst normally I might get frustrated with being confused about what is happening in a story, I decided to just run with it, and 'feel' what the message of the story was, rather than understand all the in's and out's. And what I was left with, was a poignant story that left me with a lot of questions. What is the 'story of my life' that I tell myself? How does this 'story' impact on my decisions and how I live my life? Is the 'story of my life', even accurate or true? Is accuracy or truth possible? And what secrets do we hide from ourselves or others, that dictate our ultimate outcome?
As a story in itself, I found it rather hard to follow and there were definite gaps (or at least, connections that I failed to make!). However, I really enjoyed the philosophy behind what I think the author was trying to get at, and that is why I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
May 7, 2022
I don’t have anything positive to say about this book.
The premise was exciting but the actual story felt so nonsensical. The story was told through alternating chapters of Henry and Miranda’s perspective. But Miranda is chasing her Father’s story so it felt so disjointed. The plot itself felt worthless. I’ve finished the book and I still don’t even know what it’s about. It felt so needlessly abstract that it was just hard to digest.
All the characters in the book were either mind boggling boring or just plain strange. And I can’t say I liked the way the author wrote about women. Just felt so unauthentic. The story had a whisper of mystery here and there but it did not feel like it was resolved in any towards the end.
Overall, a book about nothing. I hated it.
The premise was exciting but the actual story felt so nonsensical. The story was told through alternating chapters of Henry and Miranda’s perspective. But Miranda is chasing her Father’s story so it felt so disjointed. The plot itself felt worthless. I’ve finished the book and I still don’t even know what it’s about. It felt so needlessly abstract that it was just hard to digest.
All the characters in the book were either mind boggling boring or just plain strange. And I can’t say I liked the way the author wrote about women. Just felt so unauthentic. The story had a whisper of mystery here and there but it did not feel like it was resolved in any towards the end.
Overall, a book about nothing. I hated it.
October 1, 2024
I was expecting the woman in the picture to have a larger presence in the book. Was she the driver of Hebry's ambitions, then. Dunno. Too bitty.
The synopsis of this book here on goodreads says the book's about Henry Whitaker who returns to England after the first world war. Henry was six years old when his father died in that war. Henry never fought in it.
The synopsis of this book here on goodreads says the book's about Henry Whitaker who returns to England after the first world war. Henry was six years old when his father died in that war. Henry never fought in it.
March 6, 2024
I've read the entire book, but I could not tell you what it's about. It was interesting enough to keep me going, thinking that it would all make sense in the end, but really, I have no idea what the whole story was about.
January 18, 2026
One of the worst books I have ever read. I gave credit to the effort but overall it’s most unsatisfactory.
It’s confusing, unconvincing and full of convenient coincidences borderline laughable.
I spent 17plus hours listening to the audiobook. That’s 17 hours of my time lost in vain.
It’s confusing, unconvincing and full of convenient coincidences borderline laughable.
I spent 17plus hours listening to the audiobook. That’s 17 hours of my time lost in vain.
June 25, 2009
I'm afraid I found this book extremely tedious and irritating. there were several strands to the plot which were never brought together and a host of minor characters who seemed to add nothing to the story. I kept thinking that all will be revealed at the end but I was just left with a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe I missed the point. I also think the narration didn't help as I found it very flat and monotone.
May 7, 2013
In this very striking novel, James Wilson explores the boundaries between fiction and fact, feature and documentary. In doing so, he questions every aspect of our perception, both in terms of history and of the novel itself. Set in the inter-war period, the story concerns the career of Henry Whitaker in the largely unexamined world of the British film industry. Even as we think we have the measure of the book, it tricks us! Wilson is a very good writer.
October 1, 2015
The story is quite slow yet somehow drags you in, especially towards the end when all the pieces of the two timelines start coming together.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews