Product Description

Martin Clay, a young would-be art historian, sees a chance of a lifetime: to perform a great public service, and to make his professional reputation. To obtain the treasure he thinks he has identified involves him setting up a classic sting and risking everything that is valuable to him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #331895 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Dutch art has become fashionable with nineties novelists. Witness Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever, set in 1630s Amsterdam where a painted portrait is the focus for a tale of doomed love. Or Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring, which centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. Michael Frayn has joined the Flemish fray in Headlong, where a Bruegel has a starring role. With these paintings the author can step into a story rather than a myth. Big religious representations and gaudy Classical scenes already have the weight of literature behind them. But an enigmatic portrait, a picture of a dimly lit interior or frolicking peasants is a tale waiting to be told. They're an invitation to interpretation, and Frayn's narrator accepts this role with alacrity.

Youngish art historian Martin Clay (a Hugh Grant character gone to fat) identifies a lost Bruegel in a tumble-down country home. His intellectual dilettantism becomes focused by the arresting sight of a painting glimmering through the "grimy pane of time", and he decides to secure the painting for the nation, and a fortune for himself, without letting the owner discover its true value. There follows much double-dealing, bamboozling and suppressed hysteria as Martin and the owner try to outwit each other. At the heart of the novel is Martin's search for the meaning of the painting that has become his fate, his "triumph and torment and downfall". He pitches from gallery to museum to library delivering an extended history lesson on iconography, iconology, landscape and the ever elusive story in the Bruegel. As his obsession takes hold, the pace of the novel picks up too, a breathless rush of action, comic anguish and scholarly speculation. At points there is some irritating slapstick--shady deals in underground car parks, art treasures being tipped into the back of a mucky Landrover, as Martin's machinations go haywire, and disaster looms.

Frayn is good on the quest for the meaning of art and the lure of money and intellectual reputation, even if the plot is made to work too hard. Martin so beautifully describes the Bruegels he's studying that the reader cannot help wanting to look at them too, to step out of the story and into the picture. Thus, Headlong might have benefited from a set of illustrations. Of course, the whole novel could be an elaborate, enjoyable art hoax, and the Breugels he's describing don't actually exist at all. And if that's the case, it's very successfully done. --Eithne Farry

Customer Reviews

St Trinians/Four Weddings meet at Antiques Roadshow
Frayn has produced a witty and erudite book, which is smoothly written, witty, and has .... a plot (shock for a Booker shortlisted novel). If you can wade through the art history information (that is used as a sort of sixteenth century Inspector Morse story line), you will enjoy the whole experience.

For what it is worth I was on the "People's Jury" on Channel Four, discussing the six books on the Booker Shortlist. Two of us (myself included) voted this the best out of the six. If you want something a bit different, that involves the reader as a co-conspiritor in the murky events, then this is the book for you. The ending takes you through a brilliant roller coaster of 'will they or won't they succeed'. I will leave you to delight in the ending.

Excellent stuff. A worthy Booker shortlisted book, and best of the bunch in my opinion.

A cautionary tale of destructive obsession
A philosopher turned art historian chances upon a rare find in a debilitated country house - a lost painting by Bruegel, the 16th century Flemish master. There are only two problems - how can he coax it from its (semi-) legitimate owner, and how can he really be sure it's genuine, certain enough to jeopardize his wife and daughter's future?

What transpires is a headlong plunge into shame and hypocrisy. The Babel-like demolition of Martin's aspiring academic pride is painfully inevitable. Drawn deeper and deeper into a self-constructed conspiracy theory - the politicization of Bruegel's "Months" - he decides that he must possess the painting at any cost, or, rather, the attendant glory of its restoration to the world. The result is a dizzying fall from grace, scorched by his selfish, reckless ambition.

You will certainly enjoy it if, like me, you are a lover of Bruegel's beautiful paintings. I found the art history intriguing - a trail of evidence in search of a crime, and a powerful deconstruction of the terrifying political and social climate in which Bruegel worked.

The book benefits greatly from having to hand the paintings it describes - these allow you to investigate for yourself the illuminating details picked out by the narrator. I recommend Bruegel, by Keith Roberts: it has a concise biography and excellent, full-page, colour reproductions of the "Months" and other paintings described throughout the book.

Clever and entertaining - a perfect mix.
Forget the turgid mess that is the Da Vinci Code. Welcome to real literature: a good narrative; real characters; meaningful insights; a beginning, middle and end told with aplomb; and diversions into all sorts of apparently disparate but ultimately homogenous subjects. For as well as Brueghel the man, we learn of Brueghel the painter, Brueghel the esoteric, Brueghel the toady, Brueghel the freedom-fighter. There's also the fascinating history of the Dutch fight against Spanish imperialism, the iconography of Medieval books of hours, the philosophy of nominalism versus universalism, and the ins and outs of the London art market. All this wrapped up in a story of a man on a mission to save what he beleives is a lost Brueghel.

Just short of 400 pages, Frayn encapsulates in this novel an apparent light-hearted genre piece that has, in fact, quite profound philosophical touches underneath, in particular commentary about what exactly we see when we see things and how. But you can enjoy it on many levels. One of the best works of fiction I've read this year.