THE
MUSE
BY
JESSIE BURTON
THE BLURB:-
A picture hides a
thousand words...
On a hot July day in
1967, Odelle Bastion climbs the stone steps of the Skelton gallery in
London, ready for her luck to change. She has been employed as a
typist by the glamorous and enigmatic Marjorie Quick, who unlocks a
potential Odelle didn't realise she had. When a lost masterpiece
arrives at the gallery, Quick seems to know more than she is prepared
to reveal and Odelle is determined to unravel the truth.
The painting's secret
history lies in 1936 and a large house in rural Spain, where Olive
Schloss, the daughter of a renowned art dealer, is harbouring
ambitions of her own. Into this fragile paradise come two strangers,
who overturn the Schloss family with explosive and devastating
consequences.
THE REALITY:-
I'd like to say that I
found this unputdownable, but the truth is simply that I didn't have
the time for that to be so, what with having to study for my MA and
also having to prepare for my recent holiday in Devon. But I
learnt oh so much from this book as it touched on
subjects that are really relevant to my course, and it did that
through the 1936 artistry of Olive Schloss and the 1967 writing of
Odelle Bastien.
These are my relevant resonating
points, at a time when I was studying how process is as important as
product:-
* Isaac mentioning that art means
nothing if you're not seeing the world differently, how novelty makes
a difference.
* Olive saying she'd never before felt
so connected to the doing of the work, and how not
everything has to have a point.
* Quick saying the painting is
insidious, like there's an extra layer to it. You can't get at it but
it's there.
* Olive learning that if you
really want to see your work to completion, you have to desire it
more than you believe. You have to fight it, fight yourself and
that's not easy.
* Odelle doesn't want to share
her work, and she mentions that it's not very good. Quick points out
that it doesn't matter whether she thinks it's good or not. Quick
quotes '“You don't come into it when someone else is
reading”'.
* The work is not about you, it's
about the experience for the reader.
Lesson points aside, I've also been
learning about the qualities of voice and how accents and nuances, as
well as the way a person delivers their words, make all the
difference to a story. The author has certainly done her research
through the characters of Trinidadian immigrant Odelle and her friend
Cynthia. When these two get together you can almost feel the
essential idioms jump off the page to greet you, and you feel like
you are in the room with these two women. Contrast that with the
'proper' English Odelle feels inclined to have to use at all other
times, and especially when she's at work, with Quick. By the
strangest coincidence, I finished this book whilst in Devon. Later
that night, I switched on the TV to find that Back In Time For
Brixton (which I've seen before) which explores the social history of
postwar immigrants from the Caribbean, was being repeated.
I
loved the way the separate sections of the book all slotted together,
although not everything is explained, leaving some room for manoeuvre
for the reader. There were some horrible scenes- the violence of the
humiliation of Teresa was distressing and this is one reason why I
don't like war references (in this case the Spanish Civil war) in
novels. I also wished that (spoiler alert) Lawrie and Odelle could
have had a happy ending, and found their separation distressing. I
didn't quite get how she wasn't inclined to think she could have had
both her creativity as well as love, and it looks like she ended up a
spinster, in her house in Wimbledon. It also touched a chord
when Odelle realised that, at the end of the day, we are alone.
This
book is a must read, and I will look out for more work by this
superb, exceptional author.
