Headlong

Michael Frayn

Martin Clay decamps to a small country cottage with his wife, Kate, and baby Tilda in tow. The intention is for the young couple to spend a Summer in various Art History writing and research projects. You can tell it's going to be a town versus country novel because only Islington Londoners would call their baby after a brand of rice.

The "country" comes in the form of the Churts, the local squire and his wife, all tatty tweed jackets and Land Rovers stuffed with pheasant feed. The Churts are excellently drawn characters, where other novelists would simply have caricatured the country gentry. Frayn knows his stuff.

The Clays and Churts of this world aren't really designed to mix but Frayn throws them together for an evening when Churt invites the arty couple up for "a spot of supper" and to look at one of his paintings. Churt's pennilessness is plain to see and the sale of the odd painting would clearly help to keep him and his wife in tweed jackets, gin and ciggies for a bit longer.

Naturally, the Clays think the Churts are ghastly, but part of the comedy of the novel is that the Clays are equally ghastly in their own way. Martin Clay thinks he's spotted a lost masterpiece in the Churts' art collection and this triggers the book's main plot. Can Martin Clay authenticate the masterpiece via research, while at the same time snatch the painting from under the Churt nose?

The book's large chunks of 16th Century Art History sometimes gets a little heavy going but it's nicely tied in with the main contemporary plot. Did I forget to say it's also a comedy? I don't know much about novels about art, but I know what I like. And I liked this.