The Muse by Jessie Burton - review

Burton’s narrative strands entwine when Odelle’s would-be boyfriend, Lawrie, arrives at the Skelton with an enigmatic painting that belonged to his dead mother. When Quick sees the picture she rushes out of the gallery into the rain. In her impetuous flight lies the key to multiple layers of secrets concealed within Burton’s fiction.

Neither the painting nor Quick herself are what they appear to be. The picture is thought by the Skelton’s experts to be the work of a young Spanish Republican artist, Isaac Robles, whose striking images were bought by the American collector Peggy Guggenheim before his mysterious wartime disappearance. But we rapidly discover that the picture is actually by a young woman, Olive Schloss, who lived in Malaga with her parents, Harold, a Viennese dealer in modern art, and her fragile, depressive English mother, Sarah. After meeting Robles and his younger sister, Teresa, Olive became at first inadvertently and then deliberately embroiled in an ingenious artistic subterfuge.

Both Olive and Odelle have complex relationships with their own talent. “When something is considered ‘good’ it draws people in, often resulting with the eventual destruction of the creator,” Quick remarks gnomically, during a conversation with Odelle about writing. Olive, meanwhile, relishes her pseudonymous artistic liberty: “All the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.”

There are ideas here, waiting to be developed, about the relationship between artistic quality, value and recognition. But they are smothered by a mass of conscientious research and an extravagantly complicated plot, which forces Burton into passages of stodgy exposition and threatens in the final pages to collapse beneath its own elaborations.

Burton has a fine eye for the thingness of things (“the articulated joints of a beetle, trundling through the corn root”) and an engaging, if occasionally self-indulgent, passion for language (“birdsong arpeggios spritzing from the trees”).

The character of Odelle — a prickly combination of diffidence and egotism, with a writer’s furtive and dishonest curiosity — is by far the best thing about this otherwise rather thinly characterised novel, whose flaws will doubtless prove no impediment to its success with admirers of The Miniaturist.