Headlong: Amazon.co.uk: Michael Frayn: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Dutch art has become fashionable with nineties novelists. Witness Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever, set in 1630s Amsterdam where a painted portrait is the focus for a tale of doomed love. Or Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring, which centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. Michael Frayn has joined the Flemish fray in Headlong, where a Bruegel has a starring role. With these paintings the author can step into a story rather than a myth. Big religious representations and gaudy Classical scenes already have the weight of literature behind them. But an enigmatic portrait, a picture of a dimly lit interior or frolicking peasants is a tale waiting to be told. They're an invitation to interpretation, and Frayn's narrator accepts this role with alacrity.

Youngish art historian Martin Clay (a Hugh Grant character gone to fat) identifies a lost Bruegel in a tumble-down country home. His intellectual dilettantism becomes focused by the arresting sight of a painting glimmering through the "grimy pane of time", and he decides to secure the painting for the nation, and a fortune for himself, without letting the owner discover its true value. There follows much double-dealing, bamboozling and suppressed hysteria as Martin and the owner try to outwit each other. At the heart of the novel is Martin's search for the meaning of the painting that has become his fate, his "triumph and torment and downfall". He pitches from gallery to museum to library delivering an extended history lesson on iconography, iconology, landscape and the ever elusive story in the Bruegel. As his obsession takes hold, the pace of the novel picks up too, a breathless rush of action, comic anguish and scholarly speculation. At points there is some irritating slapstick--shady deals in underground car parks, art treasures being tipped into the back of a mucky Landrover, as Martin's machinations go haywire, and disaster looms.

Frayn is good on the quest for the meaning of art and the lure of money and intellectual reputation, even if the plot is made to work too hard. Martin so beautifully describes the Bruegels he's studying that the reader cannot help wanting to look at them too, to step out of the story and into the picture. Thus, Headlong might have benefited from a set of illustrations. Of course, the whole novel could be an elaborate, enjoyable art hoax, and the Breugels he's describing don't actually exist at all. And if that's the case, it's very successfully done. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Rueful and amusing . . . Frayn is that rare writer who succeeds as both a novelist and a dramatist."--"Randy Cohen, The New York Times Book Review"

"Finely wrought and highly comical . . . a perfect introduction to a writer who likes to pull the rug out from under your feet while offering you the most seductive of smiles."--Michael Upchurch", Seattle Times"

"Exceedingly funny, both in event and in intellectual high jinx."--Katherine A.Powers, "The Boston Sunday Globe"

"Part detective story, part art history lesson, part cautionary tale, and entirely funny."--"The New Yorker"

"Frayn isn't stingy, even here, with the laughs, gleefully pricking holes in the overconfidence of academic art criticism. But just below the sugar powder you bite into his tough-minded essay on how history and individual human folly combine and conspire to manufacture art's 'message.'"--Judith Dunford, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

"Delightful...this novel, deadpan hilarious and wonderfully written, is as effective a work of historical reconstruction as it is a comedy."--David Walton, "Philadelphia Inquirer"

""Headlong "offers an enthralling and refreshingly grown-up take on the alarming speed with which our morals shift to accommodate our desires, and on the lofty and low ways in which the great art of the past continues to affect us."--"Elle"
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

A cautionary tale of destructive obsession 2 Oct 2000

By Ebichu

Format:Paperback

A philosopher turned art historian chances upon a rare find in a debilitated country house - a lost painting by Bruegel, the 16th century Flemish master. There are only two problems - how can he coax it from its (semi-) legitimate owner, and how can he really be sure it's genuine, certain enough to jeopardize his wife and daughter's future?

What transpires is a headlong plunge into shame and hypocrisy. The Babel-like demolition of Martin's aspiring academic pride is painfully inevitable. Drawn deeper and deeper into a self-constructed conspiracy theory - the politicization of Bruegel's "Months" - he decides that he must possess the painting at any cost, or, rather, the attendant glory of its restoration to the world. The result is a dizzying fall from grace, scorched by his selfish, reckless ambition.

You will certainly enjoy it if, like me, you are a lover of Bruegel's beautiful paintings. I found the art history intriguing - a trail of evidence in search of a crime, and a powerful deconstruction of the terrifying political and social climate in which Bruegel worked.

The book benefits greatly from having to hand the paintings it describes - these allow you to investigate for yourself the illuminating details picked out by the narrator. I recommend Bruegel, by Keith Roberts: it has a concise biography and excellent, full-page, colour reproductions of the "Months" and other paintings described throughout the book.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

Read it! 14 Sep 2000

By A Customer

If Michael Frayn can get an audience thinking that they had the potential to become a nuclear-scientist if only they had got that GCSE in Physics, as he demonstrated in his huge stage success, Copenhagen, then in Headlong he demonstrates the ease in which his readers could slip into rusty, tweed-jackety academia. He opens up art history, giving fascinating desciptions of not just the paintings, but the historical context in which they were painted. So you get three novels in one - a rural farce, a treatsise on art and a social history thrown into one. I thought it was an excellent read - it reminded me very much of David Lodge's Small World. It's one of those books you want to read again when you have finished. I agree though that you need the pictures there with you (although he has such an amazing way with words that he brings the paintings alive through his words). But if that makes you buy another book, surely that's so much the better (Wouldn't you at Amazon agree! ). I'm sure sales of the Taschen series on Breugel must have shot up. It would be interesting to find out if that is the case.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

I'm sorry, Mr Frayn. 28 Feb 2010

By Bookaholic babe

Works of art have inspired many great poems and novels. For instance, Breugel's Fall of Icarus, which appears on the front cover, inspired W.H. Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts. Once you have read Auden's poem it will stay with you forever. Frayn's Headlong, on the other hand, whilst containing a very interesting exposition of art history and laugh out loud moments of farce, is not in the category of a great or even memorable novel. I would urge people to read the Auden, but I'm afraid that I'm not inclined to do the same with Headlong.