I have had a couple of months where I have been deeply immersed in detective fiction of one sort or another: Ian Rankin, Mick Herron, Robert Galbraith, just for starters. I needed an antidote … and then it was Valentines Day. My gift was a debut novel by Lucy Steeds; The Artist. A perfect present for me, longer lasting than a box of chocolates and far fewer calories.
With attractive artwork on the cover and the endpapers it was an obvious candidate for a bookshop window. Well done to Lucy Steeds for getting a first novel published, widely accepted to be a very difficult thing to achieve. I hope it sells well as it should, because it is a lovely book and a great story.
We are in Provence in 1920 and it is a suffocatingly hot summer. I really allowed myself to sink into the descriptions of heavy heat, of overripe gardens and of the deep pleasure of shade and cool water. What a treat this reading was as outside my window it continued grey, rainy and decidedly chilly.
This story is part romance, as hot and passionate as the weather and part mystery. We are introduced to an artist, Edouard Tartuffe, who has left Paris and buried himself in a remote farmhouse, deep in the south. His agent and dealer visits every few months, takes away completed pictures and sells them to a hungry market. Apart from him, Tartuffe only has Ettie for company. She runs his life around him but has no life of her own. Enter Joseph, a newly fledged journalist who wants to make his name by interviewing Tartuffe and finding out what happened in Paris to make him flee. Was there an argument with Cezanne as is generally believed?
I had only read a few chapters before I was asking Google about Tartuffe. Is his work in the National Gallery or Tate Britain? How had I missed this name? Well, I hadn’t missed it at all because Edouard Tartuffe is an invention of the author. A very, very plausible one, and others also were obviously taken in as the Afterword states clearly that he and his paintings exist only between the pages of the book.
In this sultry and seductive French landscape there is a mystery that is not unravelled until the end and I certainly did not see where it was going. As Joseph’s and Ettie’s eyes slide over each other in the perfumed heat, the reader wonders how their story will end. I loved it all and sincerely hope there is more to come from Lucy Steeds.