Vengeful brush strokes
Allan Massie
THE PORTRAIT by Iain Pears HarperPerennial, £8.99, pp. 211, ISBN 0007202776 Iain Pears is a risk-taking novelist. He does not repeat himself. This is no way to build a career or to acquire a loyal readership. Actually this statement must be qualified, for Pears is also the author of half-a-dozen agreeable soft-crime detective novels, featuring the art historian Jonathan Argyll, and these are all of a piece. If you have liked one, you will like them all. (I do.) But Pears has also written An Instance of the Fingerpost, described by at least one reviewer as a cross between Agatha Christie and Umberto Eco, and also an extraordinary novel, The Dream of Scipio, set in Provence in the three periods of history: the end of the Roman Empire, the years of the Papal residence at Avignon, and the second world war. I found it wonderfully compelling, and couldn’t understand why it failed to make the Booker shortlist.
Now comes The Portrait, a taut, disturbing monologue, entirely without the amplitude of its predecessor. The setting is the windswept island of Houat, off the Brittany coast; the time, the first decade of the 20th century. Four years ago Henry MacAlpine, a successful portrait painter, suddenly left London, without explanation, and came to live here in solitude. It’s no artists’ colony; the island is inhabited only by fishermen and their families who look on MacAlpine as an oddity. But they have come to accept him. He has made friends with the priest, and, casting aside the remnants of his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing, attends Mass and thinks of himself as a Catholic.
Now, at last, he has a visitor, William Nasmyth, distinguished critic and formerly his mentor, from the days when they were both students in Paris. Nasmyth is a man of power, or at least of influence. As he has told MacAlpine:
The time of the patron has gone. It is not the people who buy paintings who matter, not even the artist who paints them. This is the age of the critic, the thinker on art. The man who can say what art means, what it should be ...
Before he left London, MacAlpine was working on a portrait of Nasmyth. He left it unfinished. Now Nasmyth has come to the island, by his own suggestion, so that MacAlpine can complete the work. The painter has other ideas. This time he will paint the man as he really is.
The novel is, as I say, a monologue, not realistic. Addressing his subject, MacAlpine tracks back over their friendship, the relations with other painters, especially a woman called Evelyn, whom he wished to marry and whose work the critic disparaged — because she wasn’t interested in pleasing him. There is also the relationship of both men, and of Evelyn also, with a model, Jacky, an uneducated girl, part-time prostitute, and what was taken to be her suicide. We are not to suppose that MacAlpine actually says all this to Nasmyth — if he had done so, the critic would have got up and left the island.
The novel, full of interesting observations about the late 19thand early 20thcentury art world, becomes a compelling study of envy and resentment, emotions experienced by both painter and sitter. The balance between them shifts. The disciple becomes the destroyer, first on the canvas, and then perhaps ... But Pears leaves the ending open, just open, to another interpretation, as, indeed, one comes to realise, is the whole monologue itself. Is MacAlpine presenting us with the truth, or merely giving vent to an obsession? Either is possible, for evidently MacAlpine is being consumed by guilt as well as by the lust for revenge.
‘I will work on you until I have you down,’ he says, with sinister double meaning, ‘have no fear of that’ — though fear is precisely what he is inviting his sitter to experience. So the noose tightens as the monologue gathers pace and intensity, in a rhythm as mesmerising as Ravel’s Bolero.
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