Christine Lai

This engaged me the most on the level of art criticism, something I always love seeing worked into a novel. It successfully made a case for examining how violence against women is portrayed in the masterpieces and how we have been all to willing to accept when male figures in such works are painted as heroic and successful, the female figures painted with a lack of empathy, and even as willing participants in their rapes. It then engages with some more contemporary feminist responses in art which sent me on some interesting and productive googling adventures.

In my reading of the novel it tries to personify this historical way of seeing violence against women in art through the character of Julian - a wealthy businessman who lacks empathy and has treated women with violence and disregard throughout his own life. We see how from childhood he has demonstrated that he feels nothing for victims of violence and has regarded material success as most important. He gets too cartoon-villainy in my view, however, such as in scenes in which he has a fascistic attitude of “cleanse the filth from the land” towards the dispossessed.

After a separation of two decades in time Julian is undertaking a journey back home to England, where the protagonist of the novel, the suggestively named Penelope, awaits his return. Penelope however is not a faithful wife but a rape victim. She is the one processing her trauma through her essays on gender violence in art history. Penelope is a more complex character than Julian seems to be, but, friends, if we are living in a time of social and environmental collapse and widespread human catastrophe and you say something to me like:

Most of us are vegetarians now, due to the price of meat, which is one of the few good things to have come out of the world’s catastrophes.

then I’m gonna roll my eyes pretty hard.

Because another aspect of the novel is it taking place in a near future of climate-change devastation, with city cores under geodesic domes and masses of displaced internal and external refugees struggling to survive. This is more of a background to the main concern of the novel - a novel that simply takes it for granted that this will be our future so that’s the context in which the story must be set. Or perhaps it’s just that this imagined possibility didn’t engage me as much as the rest of the book.

In what I saw only near the very end of the novel, Julian is on a character arc of ultimate redemption as paralleled by the programmatic movements of Mahler’s second symphony (the “Resurrection” symphony), which he is listening to throughout his scenes of the novel. I’m not so sure this works, Julian has been rather simplistically evil to be so quickly redeemed just at the end, though I have to admit that when he steps away from destroying himself in front of an oncoming train to the symphony’s sung lyric in the fifth and final movement, Bereite dich zu leben! (“Prepare to live!”), I did feel an endorphin kick.
… (more)