Blurb:
When lovelorn Annie McDee stumbles across a dirty painting in a junk shop while looking for a present for an unstable man, she had no idea what she has discovered. Soon she finds herself drawn unwillingly into the tumultuous London art world, populated by exiles Russian oligarchs, avaricious Sheikas, desperate auctioneers and unscrupulous dealers, all scheming to get their hands on her painting - a lost eighteenth-century masterpiece called 'The Improbability of Love'. Delving into the painting's past, Annie will uncover not just an illustrious list of former owners, but some of the darkest secrets of European history - a in doing so she might just learn to open up to the possibility of falling in love again.
Review:
Apart
from reading ‘The Girl with the Pearl Ear-ring’ many years ago I have not read
many novels about art. Where this one
differs from the aforementioned, this novel is about the mad, mad world of art acquisitions
and auctions.
The
improbability of love does not merely refer to artwork itself but how we find
love in the most improbable of places, how it or the lack of it influences our
actions and affects our lives for good or ill.
Throughout
the novel we meet many interesting characters who although well written and
researched but due to the sheer number of them many felt rather two
dimensional. The novel had quite a few
points of view which could be rather confusion but each POV was written in a different
way. Interestingly enough we also get
the POV of the artwork itself which was original and fascinating.
The
POVs include those of wealthy society types, gallery owners, Russian oligarchs,
politicians, scholar, restorers, and ‘ordinary everyday’ people. Their lives are both fascinating and on
occasion heart-breaking … the lengths people will go to, to acquire an
important piece of art. However, instead
of being a major part of the plot; many could have merely been supporting
characters as is befitting their station.
The
plot was reasonably paced and suspenseful.
Without giving too much away there was a mention of Holocaust/Nazi
history. Although a literary work of fiction the descriptions of the art and
the food draw you in and make you want to be a part of the action.
One
of the main characters and the unwitting owner of the artwork was Annie who had
a very dysfunctional relationship with life, love and her alcoholic mother. Yet through the novel Annie grows and
develops her love of life, work and another.
This
book is good albeit there were, in places large gaps in the story; and the
ending felt rather rushed. There seemed
to be huge gaps between some significant events near the end, as if the author
had been given a page count and had to cut a lot of the novel out to achieve
it.
Sometimes
the novel cannot decide whether it wants to be a modern or even archaic romance,
a satire of the London art scene, a cooking book, a mystery, a history of the lives
who owned the painting or of art theft in Nazi Germany. Perhaps the author was trying to cover too much
ground in her debut novel. All that
taken together with the rather archaic/literary and foreign words used could
put quite a few readers off. Thank
goodness for the build in dictionary feature of my Kindle.
I
think the most interesting part of the novel was the restoration and researching
the history of the artwork (proving is provenance); and what this painting
meant to its creator and each of its owners.
As
a first novel this work is reasonably well polished although some more editing
would have given it more of a gleam. I
will definitely be looking for more works by this author.
Thank you Netgalley for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Netgalley review 4 stars, Goodreads and Amazon review 4 stars
