The Muse by Jessie Burton
My rating: 4/5 cats
when i was packing up my go-bag to prepare for my recent adventure in back surgery, when there was still a 50/50 chance i would have to stay at least one night in the hospital following the procedure, and remembering the mistakes i made years ago during back surgery #1 when the “you will be staying here for three nights” announcement came as a complete surprise and i told sean of the house to “just grab me a stack from near the bed” and ended up with books i’d already read, books from the middle of series i hadn’t yet started, and books too ponderous for someone on morphine to handle, i was determined to only bring foolproof, five-star cat, fall-into-’em books that would make the tedium of bed rest bearable.
this was not my first choice.
as much as i enjoyed The Miniaturist, the synopsis of this one didn’t grab me right away: caribbean émigré in 1960s london, bohemian woman in 1930s spain, powerful mystery, art world, revolutionary fervor, civil war – it seemed too disparate to be likely to hold my attention through the distractions of pain spasms and medical invasions and immodest hospital gowns and the steady iv drips of painkillers.
but i tossed it into the bag with the rest of ’em anyway because why not? and when my surgery was delayed for FIVE HOURS and i was imprisoned in that chair, in an admittedly not-terribly immodest hospital gown, it was the first book i blindly pulled out of the bag. and you know what? my interest was held. because once i started reading, i remembered what made The Miniaturist so good. it wasn’t that i had any prior interest at all in amsterdam’s golden age or sugar plantations or the craft of miniatures as an art movement – it’s because jessie burton can write. it doesn’t even really matter what she’s writing about, it just flows in this effortlessly captivating way that sucks you in even when you might be starving to death and dehydrated from surgery-fasting and wishing, for the first time ever, that someone would just come along and cut you open already.
for example, this – from the perspective of odelle bastien, aforementioned caribbean émigré:
The name ‘Edmund Reede’ for me conjured up a quintessential, intimidating Englishness, Savile Rowers in Whitehall clubs; eat the steak, hunt the fox. Three piece suit, pomaded hair, great-uncle Henry’s golden watch. I would see him round the corridor, and he would look surprised every time. It was as if I had walked in off the street, naked. We studied men like him at school – protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.
this is just everything – the rhythm of the sentences, the vividness of the description, her depiction of workplace integration as startled british politeness without rancor that still manages to reference the bitter aftertaste of colonialism’s legacy. it kills me.
full review to come, but i wanted to get that out there now for people like me (although with better spines, hopefully) who may not feel drawn to this book by the synopsis alone. now you have the synopsis, an anecdote, and a quote.
oh, and this, if it helps:
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okay, i suppose i should write a more in-depth review of the actual book and not just rely on super-sexxy hospital gown photos to do all the work for me…
it’s a solid sophomore novel from burton, and i can’t help but interpret this one quote as a sly little wink from her about the anxiety of writing a second novel after a very successful debut:
“I’ve seen what success does to people, Isaac, how it separates them from their creative impulse, how it paralyses them. They can’t make anything that isn’t a horrible replica of what came before, because everyone has opinions on who they are and how they should be.”
but not to worry – although it’s another historical novel in which art and gender feature prominently, this is no ‘horrible replica’ – it has merits all its own.
it’s a bit more ambitious in scope than The Miniaturist – there are two separate historical narratives woven together, detailing the experiences of two women: odelle bastien in the 1960s and olive schloss in the 1930s. odelle is a talented writer who leaves trinidad and goes to london, where she ends up working at an art institute for an enigmatic woman named quick and begins a relationship with a man named lawrie scott. olive is living in spain with her parents – her father a successful viennese art dealer and her mother a languid, emotionally fragile english heiress. olive is a very talented painter, a fact she has kept from her father who believes that women do not have what it takes to become true artists. the two stories are linked by a painting originating in olive’s storyline that is brought to the institute that employs odelle, but there are other touchpoints – both are strong, somewhat aloof, characters enduring the expectations others impose on them because of their race or gender, and the limited opportunities they have to fully blossom, both are encouraged or enabled by people who are a little odd themselves, and there are additional thematic echoes involving patronage, identity, the creative process, artistic works produced in secret
of the two stories, i liked odelle’s much more. she’s a more appealing character, and she does indeed have a way with words, even the ones she doesn’t speak aloud to those who would condescend to her.
‘I remember…a feller saying to me in the shoe shop, ‘your English is very good.’ My English! I told him, “English is a West Indian language, sir.”‘ …
“Your English is not as good as mine,” I should have said.”It does not have the length and the breadth, the meat and the smoke. Come at me with my Creole, with its Congo and its Spanish and its Hindi, French and Ibo, English and Bhojpuri, Yoruba and Manding.”‘
yeah, odelle gets all the best lines.
but olive’s no slouch – a “fizzing girl,” with “a plaintive, open face” who paints arresting canvases, and allows another to take the credit. i didn’t always understand the decisions she made, but at least she gets to make declarations like, It was always easier to admire someone with a talent, and pity was the path to indifference, and the scene in which that line occurs is probably my favorite in the whole book. it’s a perfectly rendered revelation/disappointment moment for olive where she realizes that confidence is not an indication of talent, and men, accustomed to praise and success, were maybe strutting a confidence they hadn’t actually earned. earlier in the book, she gets another great long rant, which i’m totally gonna quote because it’s golden:
Her father always said that of course, women could pick up a paintbrush and paint, but the fact was, they didn’t make good artists. Olive had never quite worked out what the difference was…But right now in Paris, Amrita Sher-Gil, Meret Oppenheim and Gabriele Münter were all working – Olive had even seen their pieces with her own eyes. Were they not artists? Was the difference between being a workaday painter and being an artist simply other people believing in you, or spending twice as much money on your work?
As far as Olive saw it, this connection of masculinity with creativity had been conjured from the air and been enforced, legitimised and monetised by enough people for whom such a state of affairs was convenient – men like her father. Thus, for centuries it had become the status quo. The artist as naturally male was such a widely held presupposition, that Olive, to her shame, had come at times to believe in it herself. As a nineteen-year-old girl, she was on the underside; the dogged, plucky mascot of amateurship. I’m not ‘good’ enough; I don’t have the grit, the vision, the flair, the spine, the spark.
odelle has a similar observation, listening to the BBC’c Caribbean Voices on the radio as a little girl
Here’s the mad thing: poets from Barbados, Trini, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua – any part of the British Caribbean – would send their stories all the way to London’s Oxford Street, in order to hear them read back again in their homes, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean. There seemed no local facility to enable these stories to be processed, a fact which impressed upon me at a very young age that in order to be a writer, I would require the motherland’s seal of approval, the imperial sanction that my words were broadcastable.
The majority of the work was by men, but I would listen enraptured by the words and voices of Una Marson, Gladys Lindo, Constance Hollar – and Cynth would pipe up, ‘one day you be read out, Delly’ – and her little shining face, her bunches, she always made me feel like it was true. Seven years old, and she was the only one who ever told me to keep going. By 1960 that programme had stopped, and I came to England two years later with no idea what to do with my stories.
it’s an excellent book, clearly very well-researched, and if the appeal of the storylines is a little unbalanced, that’s probably just my personal preferences talking. it’s a little more handled and predictable than The Miniaturist, but her writing is gorgeous enough that it didn’t stop me from loving the guts out of it.
