Book review: The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

The Forgery of Venus is New York Times best-selling author Michael Gruber’s latest opus and it is a humdinger. Intelligent, exciting and scholarly without being pedantic, this novel examines the fine and often blurry line between true genius and true madness.

This is the story of Charles “Chaz” Wilmot, a modern painter of some talent who may or may not also be Diego Velazquez, the famous painter and portraitist who died in 1660. Rather than truly explore his art, Wilmot makes his living doing commercial art; he has a gift for copying and can reproduce nearly any of the Old Masters that his commercial clients might request. When an old college friend lets him know about a drug trial that studies the effect of an experimental drug on creativity, Wilmot signs up. The effects are instantaneous and amazing: not only does he manage to tap into skill and imagination long-dormant, he also starts to hallucinate that he is Velazquez, re-living the painter’s private life in details that could not be known by modern folk.

Things get complicated quickly. Wilmot’s hallucinations come more frequently and at one point he loses track of three full months of his life, coming back to what he used to refer to as “reality” with no recollection of what he’d been doing – except for a painting he thought he did in the 1600s but which is resting on the easel before him. He is approached by a sinister and possibly connected figure, Werner Krebs, who appreciates Wilmot’s redoubtable skill and uncanny knowledge of Don Diego’s life: Krebs wants Wilmot to forge a lost painting so that he can sell it as a true Velazquez. Before long, Wilmot has created masterpieces that turn out to be indistinguishable from their purported origins – paintings that would be masterpieces even if it was ever learned that he painted them and not Velazquez or Tiepolo. But Wilmot has lost his family, lost his mind, and lost his hold on who and when he’s supposed to be.

In addition to being exciting and paranoiac, The Forgery of Venus is smart, providing nearly an art history elective’s worth of insight into Velazquez and his contemporaries. While knowledge of art history is not at all necessary to enjoy the story, it would certainly add to the experience; I ended up marking a number of pages so that I could later go online and see the art the characters were discussing. The reader is also treated to a seminar on how to forge an Old Master, reminiscent of What’s Bred in the Bone by the under-appreciated Robertson Davies. Gruber is not as witty as Davies but still entertains while educating – an accomplishment not easily attained.

I enjoyed The Forgery of Venus immensely. It starts a little slowly, in a possibly unnecessary story-within-a-story framework, before launching headlong into the first person narration by Chaz Wilmot that makes up the bulk of the novel – great, strange stuff. I’d never read anything by Gruber before but after this introduction I will make it a point to track down his earlier novels.

Book Review: Two Trilogies by Robertson Davies

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most Americans have never heard of Robertson Davies, novelist, essayist, playwright, actor, professor and publisher, who died in 1995. It’s a shame, really, because this old-fashioned Canadian has written some of the cleverest, most erudite-yet-accessible and tightly-plotted novels I’ve read.

His Deptford Trilogy is made up of three novels: Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975). My paperback copy of this omnibus has 825 pages. The same cabal of characters inhabits all three novels although the focus of each separate novel is different. Fifth Business is told in first person and narrated by Dunstan Ramsay, a Canadian boy who grows up to be a schoolteacher and a world-renowned expert on saints. The Manticore is related as dialogue between David Staunton (son of Boy Staunton, a childhood and adult friend of Dunstan Ramsay) and his Swiss Jungian psychoanalyst. World of Wonders returns to Ramsay, technically as first-person narrator, who quotes the conversations and stories told to him by Magnus Eisengrim, a famous magician. The action that sets the three novels in motion is this: Ramsay, as a child, ducks a snowball thrown by Boy Staunton which hits Eisengrim’s pregnant mother, causing her to go into labor prematurely.

The Cornish Trilogy is comprised of The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred In the Bone (1985) and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) and the paperback comes in at an impressive 1,136 pages. As in the earlier trilogy, the same characters populate all three novels in varying degrees. The Rebel Angels takes place at a Canadian University: an eccentric art collector, Francis Cornish, has died, naming three of the professors as his executors. What’s Bred In the Bone leads us through Cornish’s very interesting life, from his childhood in a small town in Ontario, to his university education in Toronto (where his path crosses that of Dunstan Ramsay), to his apprenticeship as a painter and restorer, his war experiences and his return home to Canada. In The Lyre of Orpheus, the executors of Cornish’s will have established a charitable foundation which is sponsoring the completion of an unfinished opera by a doctoral candidate prodigy.

I don’t remember how I discovered these books. I do remember sitting down with The Cornish Trilogy, a little intimidated at first, but almost immediately getting sucked into this world Davies had created. These novels are dryly funny, intellectual – incorporating, with reason and clarity, art history and criticism, comparative literature, opera theory, hagiology and Jungian archetypes (to list just a sampling) – and yet understandable to the layperson. The scope of the narratives span decades, generations and continents but Davies brings everything together by the end – the Lost writers could learn a thing or two from him about tying up plot points! Do not be put off by the number of pages, although I suppose in this age of Harry Potter folks are less alarmed by a book’s thickness: these smart and funny novels should be savored at length.