2008-06-26 'People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.'

This is a cleverly constructed book with the central motif the painting by Gwen John.

As in the film 'The Red Violin' in which a violin moves across the world and across time frames,so too does the painting go from woman to woman, home to home and we follow its progress through a succession of chapters.
I was captivated by Margaret Forster's ability to adapt her style to the era about which she was writing, beginning and ending the book with the same person in the same era. So a cyclical movement is established and that is entirely appropriate to the concerns of the novel.

' It needs to go from woman to woman, to be part of their lives, affecting them every day.'
We witness the journey by which this picture goes 'from woman to woman' beginning with Gwen John, and then moving from Paris to London and owing to a confusion going to the home of Charlotte, who worships the painting but sees the theft of it as a metaphor for her loss of talent.
Then through a circuitous route through many experiences, until at the end of the book, it is back in Paris and Gillian who saw it when she was on a school Art trip, comes across it again.

When she saw it during the school trip to the Tate Gallery, she said to her teacher 'What effect did it have on the people who have looked at it?'
As one of those people, she comes to realise the effect which it had on all the people in its past and she asks 'Don't artists want to put more than the paint on their canvases?'

Although Gwen John painted it 'to keep the world away' and it 'helped others to do the same' yet also, it became an integral part of many lives.

And through reading this book and seeing a small reproduction of the painting on the back of the paperback copy published by Vintage, it becomes a part of our lives as well.

Val De Beer.