Headlong
One of the downsides of doing a PhD (and not commuting an hour and a half to work every day) is that I rarely seem to have time to read fiction. I have therefore read little (and nothing relevant to this blog) since my last post on The Museum of Innocence. But, recently, I have finished a not unrelated novel, Headlong, by Michael Frayn.
This work also considers the strange emotive power of objects, one object to be precise, and also pivots around a car crash. But this car crash does not establish the power of a collection of objects like Pamuk’s museum, rather it destroys the painting around which Frayn’s novel revolves, bringing it the different mythical status which belongs only to famous artworks which are now lost. Headlong is the story of Martin Clay, a youngish, fledgling art historian who discovers, in a rundown country pile, what he increasingly convinces himself is a lost painting from Peter Breughel’s The Months. His race to establish the scholarship behind this attribution and to win for himself fame, a benevolent role in the art world, and a small fortune involve some highly dubious, and increasingly dramatic, dealings with the painting and it’s owner. He is plunged ‘headlong’ into a series of lies and decisions, which see him wrestling constantly with his inner scholar to gain the strength to simply walk away from the painting.
What the novel beautifully shows, therefore, is the compulsion experienced in scholarship when you are drawn by the tantalizing scent of a new source. The more Martin investigates, the more he becomes obsessed with the painting, and begins to see it as ‘his’ by right. At the end, he is unable to distinguish the priority of saving the Breughel or his friend/mistress (a relationship he is similarly unable to distinguish properly) from the burning, crashed car. Frayn pulls the reader into a Breughelian world of detail and colour, bringing both the context and the paintings vividly to life. You are left believing that the painting exists, and wondering why Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus features on the dust jacket instead. This leaves me unsure whether including other illustrations would aid or hinder the reader’s idea of the painting.
Despite the irritatingly Olympian quantities of travel and research that Martin is supposedly able to achieve in a day, not to mention the level of income at his disposal for impromptu train travel, Frayn’s novel paints a colourful image of the joys and dangers of scholarship, and the strong emotions which sources and objects can arouse. It is almost on a par with the incomparable Possession by A.S. Byatt, incidentally, recently dramatised on Radio 4.