Michael Fitzgerald (12)

It’s just coincidence, but Michael Fitzgerald’s The Pacific Room – a novel loosely based around the last days of Robert Louis Stevenson – is being published in the same year as the biographical Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa by Joseph Farrell. It was interesting to have read the bio first, because it made RLS more familiar to me than if I’d relied on the novel alone.

The Pacific Room is not, however, primarily about RLS, though allusions to his stories are woven throughout the show more novel. The book begins in the reading room of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where PhD candidate Lewis Wakefield is researching his obsession with a portrait of RLS, painted a century earlier by an Italian artist called Girolamo Nerli. At the Mitchell he finds a small pencil drawing, 'the portrait in its original guise, rendered not in oil but in pencil, in rehearsal for the real thing'.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/09/06/the-pacific-room-by-michael-fitzgerald/ show less