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From the first chapters of Iain Pears's THE PORTRAIT, you'd be forgiven for thinking it isn't a mystery novel. You'll find no corpse, no detectives, no question, really, for quite some time, only a middle-aged Scottish painter, Henry McAlpine, welcoming the distinguished London art critic William Nasmyth to his humble home on the coast of Brittany in 1913, and then painting a portrait of him that he claims will be his magnum opus. You'll notice, perhaps, that I'm writing this review in the second person. That's because THE PORTRAIT is written entirely in the second person, as McAlpine natters to Nasmyth while he paints. This powerfully locks you into the tiny room with the two men, in their present moment, and is also very addictive. McAlpine reminisces about his and Nasmyth's intersecting lives in London's art world, and their interactions with two women. These are the model and sometime prostitute Jacky, and Evelyn, a good painter with a great bullshit detector. Evelyn counts Jacky as her friend, but rejects both McAlpine and Nasmyth. All four characters have secrets, which McAlpine divulges bit by bit. I guessed most of them ages in advance, but that doesn't matter: as you read, you come to dread what you know is coming and wish won't be. There are plenty of catty allusions to turn-of-the-century decadent culture, art, and murder, if you like searching for those. There's an East End prostitute who turns up dead, reminiscent of the victims of Jack the Ripper. The deeply misogynistic painter Walter Sickert, fingered for the Ripper murders, apparently wrongly, by modern crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, has a brief cameo. McAlpine imagines himself as an exemplary famous prisoner in a courtroom, silently envied for his performance by Oscar Wilde, and the particular tessellations of portrait-painting, obsessive desire, and murder in London's Bohemia might have been meant to recall Dorian Gray. As a result, the book sometimes sounds like a pastiche of fin-de-siecle imagery, but it's a brazenly self-conscious one. Set at the dawn of the modernist era, THE PORTRAIT is itself a postmodernist novel, riddled with metafictional attacks on the industries of text-making and criticism. Pears riotously skewers the 'paper amorality' of people who 'trumpet . . . the bohemian ethic in a literary journal' without 'taking part in it', and those who mistake this pose for artistic merit. McAlpine investigates the little murders that a cynic would say define the art and academic realms. But as his work and his tale move toward their end, more disturbing presences emerge. When does criticism move beyond the spitefulness of megalomaniac pretensions to real and deadly power? And can it call for revenge? Finally, are McAlpine's reasons for modelling the portrait of Nasmyth upon one of King Charles I entirely aesthetic? Read THE PORTRAIT and find out, and then find someone to discuss it with for a couple of hours.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, September 2005
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