Tiepolo Blue: 'The best novel I have read for ages' Stephen Fry

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in theory i'm always up for a book about a disastrous cambridge closet case, but i wasn't a fan of this one. heads up beforehand that the art criticism is cool and the setting and place is done well, and that other people seem to like this one more than i do. however. The writing, when talking about Art History, Cahill’s area of expertise, is convincing, even beautiful at times. But when he talks about the London art scene and gay scene, in fact most things out of the realm of classical art, it came across as naive and cliché. Perhaps Cahill is almost as out of his own depth in these worlds as his protagonist?

How to rate an unfinished novel? I recognized good penmanship and the narration was great. But the story is so depressing I dislike it. The foreboding feeling when following Don's lonely life, manipulated by a villainous character, was too strong for me. Don is a naive idiot and I don't want to know more about his life after listening 50%. I was waiting for the love interest but am afraid that will end depressing, too. Tiepolo Blue tells the story of a naive, old-before-his-years Cambridge professor, Don Lamb, whose passion is the Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Having lived and worked in a Cambridge college since he was a student Don is unaware of life outside academia and when he suddenly loses his job he gradually loses sight of reality. Changes made to the monetization of users’ creations and the ability to opt out from your account settings.

Don Lamb, distinguished professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the protagonist of Tiepolo Blue, is only forty-three, but while reading the novel I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. The professor is fusty beyond his years: he sees himself as a noble defender of the classical tradition, a crusader against those academics who concern themselves with the ‘fashionable irrelevances’ of ‘society, politics or psychology’ rather than ‘the fundamental things: proportion, light, balance’. There is no shortage of public figures expressing similar views nowadays, but James Cahill has chosen to set his arresting debut novel not in the midst of today’s so-called culture wars but in the 1990s, with the influence of ‘that dreadful man Jacques Derrida’ fresh in the memory and the term ‘political correctness’ newly in vogue. I wanted an experience where my eyes were opened to the beauty of new art but instead, I found myself drawn into a world of horrible people who had no reason to be.

More than about a story about queerness, it is, to my understanding, a story about letting go. Of pressure, the past, what you expect your future to be. This is a character-driven novel but so much happens as Don stumbles through one self-imposed crisis to another that no further plot is needed. The descriptions are excellent and the atmosphere is as dark as one expects. I was surprised that Aids wasn't mentioned, except obliquely, as it was certainly rife among gay men at that time. Also, the abruptness of the ending was a disappointment for me. There is some debate as to when this fresco was painted, but in all likelihood, it was undertaken between 1716-19. It adorns the ceiling of the Parish Church of Biadene, near Treviso, Italy and shows the Virgin bound for Heaven borne on a cloud, flanked by a number of angels and putti. As for setting, it’s a fascinating mix of worlds where you start in academia and end up in the art world and Soho. Don is an out of touch and rather pompous academic who hasn’t a clue about the real world. I read how he started in Cambridge and ended up in London and Soho at that. A story that was painfully fascinating in so many ways.Don is detestable at first: I was worried I wouldn't relate or feel close to him at all, but the character development!! The Glory of Spain is a brilliant fusion of elements drawn from his previous work including decorative features from his time in residence at the Würzburg and his frescoes at the spectacular Villa Pisani in Stra (situated on the canal linking Venice and Padua). Tiepolo had in fact completed the oil sketches for The Glory of Spain before leaving Venice. However, on arrival at the palace, Tiepolo was faced with the problem of decorating a throne room with inadequate natural light sources. His chromatic oil sketches could not therefore be fully realized. There is then a degree of imposed improvisation in the way Tiepolo, to compensate for the relatively subdued chromatic treatment, created his largest ever empty expanse of sky. Tiepolo left enough room in his painting to let the eye of the spectator fill in the blanks; allowing them in effect to bring their own interpretations to the scene. It is this aspect of his method perhaps that would exert such a profound influence on the likes of Fragonard, Delacroix and Goya all of whom sought to use art to invoke the imagination of the spectator through open space. As it is though, the story was told by a third person omniscient narrator and, even for 1990s standards, I struggled to swallow such naivety. Even less so, when the guy was described as a handsome and intelligent lad. He might not have known who he was or what he really liked but that doesn’t mean people around him also didn’t, if you know what I mean. I'm going to be lazy and just refer those interested to the incisive Guardian review below, but let me just end by saying this is one of the most beautifully bound volumes I've seen in recent years - not only the gorgeous gold embossed cover, but also full color endpapers of one of the titular artist's masterpieces. Highly recommended, and quite possibly my #1 book of the year.

It is, I accept, a clever enough work which does pass the time quite well, but I kept having the nagging feeling that this kind of thing has been done before, and the closest comparison I can think of is with Martin Amis’s Money, in which the main character finds that he has been the unknowing – until the very end – victim of a years-long conspiracy of vengeance for an offence committed long in the past. (Unlike Money, though, it is not trying to be funny.) The thing is that one doesn’t really read Amis for the plot, but the language; it’s kind of the other way round with this novel. His move to London yields even more of these scandals, alongside a slow-burning realisation about his sexuality and about what he has been too oblivious to see along. Biography: James Cahill was born in London. Over the past decade, he has worked in the art world and academia, combining writing and research with a role at a leading contemporary art gallery. He is currently a Research Fellow in Classics at King’s College London. His writing on art has appeared in publications including The Burlington Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement,the Los Angeles Review of Books,and The London Review of Books.He was theleadauthorand consulting editor ofFLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN (Phaidon, 2018), a survey of classical myth in art from antiquity to the present day. He was the co-curator of ‘The Classical Now’, an exhibition at King’s College London (March-April 2018), examining the relationships between ancient, modern and contemporary art.

I found the characters unbelievable too, was Don that stupid that he couldn't see he was being played the whole time? Was he so wrapped up in Cambridge life that he had no idea what AIDS was?

My deep thanks go to Hodder & Stoughton for an advanced digital copy through Netgalley in exchange for review. I was gripped by the way this story unravels to show us the life of Don Lamb, a professor at Cambridge who is obsessed with the artwork of Tiepolo, and whose various disgraces and scandals seem to layer as he progresses through life. In Cambridge, this man, the only son of elderly parents is lonely and alone. His world is small but safe and he has lived a sheltered life in more ways than one. He ‘s a great professor but not prepared for a life outside of these walls. On moving to London, the man transforms and not always for the better. In fact you could say the man spirals downwards from this moment on. I think this story could’ve worked better for me if it had been told from a first person point of view. I mean, at least I could’ve tried to believe that the guy was an unreliable narrator who wanted us to think that, for some reason, and despite being in his early forties, he didn’t have any sexual experience whatsoever.This books feels to me like a clever and thoughtful companion piece to Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty', a book I adore, with a similar sense of a sweltering summer, sexual energy, and lingering darkness, but it also takes a trip into unreliability and memory that I found riveting and the best kind of unsettling.