The Portrait (Hardcover)

by Iain Pears (Author) "Well, well, well..." (more)
Key Phrases: Father Charles, Holland Park, Madame Le Gurun (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Justly praised for his complex historical thrillers (An Instance of the Fingerpost; The Dream of Scipio), Pears scales down to a simple tale of vengeance told by a narrator obsessed with destroying the man he once called his friend and mentor. Henry MacAlpine has abandoned his comfortable life as a celebrated portraitist in early 1900s London and fled to a tiny island off the coast of Brittany. To that lonely spot he lures William Naysmith, the British art world's most famous critic, with the promise of painting his portrait. In the course of the narrative, MacAlpine recalls the development of his artistic talent with the advice and praise of the ambitious Naysmith. The suspense lies in the gradual revelation of Naysmith's ruthless use of power, yet the double crime for which MacAlpine holds him accountable comes as little surprise. While this novel never approaches the sly cleverness and tingling suspense of John Lanchester's A Debt toPleasure, which it otherwise resembles, readers will enjoy some period ironies, as when MacAlpine expresses contempt for the upstart French Impressionists, while the contemptible Naysmith discerns their true genius. Anybody in the business of criticism, whether it be artistic or literary, will be chastened by Pears's indictment of a critic's power to make or ruin reputations.
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From The Washington Post
Scottish painter Henry MacAlpine is self-exiled on a remote island off Brittany. He accepts a commission from his old friend and adversary, eminent art critic William Nasmyth, to paint his portrait. Nasmyth sits for several days and does not utter a word (a marvelously inventive act of silencing a critic) as MacAlpine recounts an eventful life.

This, essentially, is the framework of Iain Pears's mesmerizing, if at times lugubrious novel The Portrait. But Pears, renowned author of the philosophical thriller An Instance of the Fingerpost, is a shrewd and masterful raconteur, and we are in for much more than a mortal reckoning between artist and critic (though we get that, too). This is a novel of pitiless revenge. ("A critic is to a painter as a eunuch is to a man.") MacAlpine's monologue posits that, given free rein, nostalgia eventually slips into retribution.

Under a seemingly endless barrage of indignities and grievances, what keeps Nasmyth in his chair? Most likely it is Mac- Alpine's intensity, his brutal candor, the way his memories accumulate into self-interrogation and his ability to communicate on many levels at once. It's a memorable performance, yet when MacAlpine finally insists that the critic -- the object of his disaffection -- accompany him to a wind-blown cliff at night, the reader gets a harrowing sense that Nasmyth will not live to remember it.

The backdrop of The Portrait is the thriving art scene in Paris and London when French Impressionists such as Matisse and Seurat were subverting received and comfortable notions of reality -- and becoming famous. During this period, MacAlpine labored away in poverty and confused obscurity, while Nasmyth's reputation rose. "We made it, you and I," says MacAlpine, acting as autobiographer and biographer. "You first, of course, with your wealthy wife, the books and articles, your place advising those American bankers, your trusteeships of museums, all the rest of it. But I, with my gruff Scottish manners convincing sitters they had an authentic artist on their hands, was on my way too."

Early on, MacAlpine admits, "You see, your very presence takes me back into the past and wakes up all sorts of memories I had forgotten about for years, which have not troubled me for a long time." This sentence alone suggests what a wonderfully unreliable narrator MacAlpine is; he has clearly been haunted by Nasmyth's betrayals for decades. And it's not exactly as if MacAlpine finally has someone to reminisce with, either. Rather, he seems like a man who has been talking to himself for years and now is talking to himself in front of someone. His prodigious holding forth as a creative act must provide the same sort of reprieve for MacAlpine that Joseph Conrad referred to when he said, "I wrote each of my novels so I could stop thinking about it