Girl With a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier

My wife grabbed this one out of my hands just after I'd started it and swept through it within a day and a half. She plonked it down and declared that it was a very good novel but that I would hate it. "Chick fiction" she said.

It's all told through the eyes of Griet, a seventeen year old wise innocent, newly installed as lowly maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch painter. There are friends and enemies to be discovered when you are a new maid. One of the best and most dangerous friendships she begins is with the master of the house, Vermeer himself. Friendships between maids and masters always end badly and this one is no different but Tracey Chevalier's version of a destructive liaison across the class divide is told with great cleverness and subtlety.

So, yes, I did like it, after a slow start. The prose style is deliberately very simple but effective. The same can be said of the ending ... unsensational, simple and effective. It seemed to me like Chevalier had a plan and stuck to it.