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Bookish Quotes
"I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read."
Headlong
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Headlong
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2 journalers for this copy...
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Ruthwater! Thanks so much for the wonderful parcel of books and the Mslexia magazine (great name!). What a treat to come home to this at the end of a long Friday. I'm off on a five day business trip starting on Sunday, and am hoping to get caught up on my fiction reading, so your timing was perfect. I'll let you know what I think of Headlong, and would be happy to post it back when I'm done if you still think you might like to read it.
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When I was fifteen, an older hippie cousin living several provinces away began to take an interest in my intellectual development. It was 1979, long before email, so he wrote me long letters in sepia ink, carefully etched onto handmade paper. I responded faithfully -- delighted and flattered to be engaged in so adult a correspondence -- in ballpoint pen on three-holed paper torn from a school notebook. I wish I'd kept copies of our letters. Probably the biggest disagreement my cousin and I ever had concerned the correct answer to a hypothetical he put to me in one of those letters: "You are standing in the Louvre museum, and it's on fire. You have exactly 20 seconds to save either a priceless 17th century masterpiece, the likes of which the world may never see again, or a kitten. Which should you save?" "The painting", I responded immediately, desperate to avoid looking like a sentimental child. My cousin's response, received several weeks later, took me by surprise: "The kitten, of course!". It's been twenty-six years, and I've neither forgotten the debate, nor figured out (or perhaps, made peace with) the correct answer. It's obvious Michael Frayn is familiar with a similar hypothetical (for all I know, this is a famous puzzle in moral philosophy), and that he's still struggling as well. Headlong is constructed around a long-standing mystery associated with a series of pictures painted in 1565 by Pieter Bruegel "the Elder" (ca. 1525 - 1569), sometimes referred to as The Seasons. There are five known paintings in the series (The Hunters in the Snow, The Gloomy Day, The Return of the Herd, Haymaking and The Corn Harvest), and art historians puzzle over whether the set is complete. As Frayn describes in the novel, the pastoral theme of the pictures is also somewhat of a mystery, since Bruegel was painting in anything but peaceful times. Fast forward from the 16th century to the countryside outside London, some time in the 1990s. Martin Clay, a young philosopher and would-be art historian, his wife Kate (a real art historian, on whose academic terroir Martin shamelessly lolls) and their baby daughter Tilda have just arrived at their country home for a stay of several months, designed to force Martin to get to work on his book (topic: the impact of nominalism on Netherlandish art of the fifteenth century, a "sudden pounce sideways out of philosophy into something more like art"). Like half the western world, Martin has difficulty staying focused on the Task At Hand. So it's with some hesitation he and Kate accept an invitation to dine with an older neighbour at his country estate, knowing the agenda for the evening is likely to include a request for their opinion on a piece of art. They're right, but more distracting than the piece on which they're consulted is one on which they're not: a "Dutch bugger" (in the words of the neighbour) he's using to stop up the soot the birds kick down the chimney. The painting is entitled Pretmakers in een Berglandschap ("Merrymakers in a mountain landscape"), and Martin knows immediately, instinctively, like "recogniz[ing] a friend without ever having determined wherein his particular qualities lie", that it's a Bruegel. More specifically, he believes it's one of the missing panels from The Seasons. Headlong absolutely takes off from this point. Among its most memorable elements are the early relationship between Kate, Martin and the Churts, their rural neighbours (particularly the conversation at pp. 23 - 27), the relationship between Kate and Martin themselves, and the novel's perfect characterization of what it is to be in the grips of an intellectual obsession. Frayn's exploration of 16th century European history -- a kind of back story throughout the middle part of the novel -- was ambitious, but I found I couldn't stay clearly tuned into it (there's that focus problem again). Fortunately, careful attention to this aspect of the book didn't prove critical to staying with the story. I'm sending this book back to ruthwater, 'cause I'm guessing the relationship stuff (husband/wife, country folks/city folks), the pokes at the chattering class, the moral questions at the heart of the novel and the overall humorousness of the story will appeal to her. Over to you, Ruth :^). |
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