Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 'People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.' June 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a cleverly constructed book with the central motif the painting by Gwen John.
As in the film 'The Red Violin' in which a violin moves across the world and across time frames,so too does the painting go from woman to woman, home to home and we follow its progress through a succession of chapters.
I was captivated by Margaret Forster's ability to adapt her style to the era about which she was writing, beginning and ending the book with the same person in the same era. So a cyclical movement is established and that is entirely appropriate to the concerns of the novel.
' It needs to go from woman to woman, to be part of their lives, affecting them every day.'
We witness the journey by which this picture goes 'from woman to woman' beginning with Gwen John, and then moving from Paris to London and owing to a confusion going to the home of Charlotte, who worships the painting but sees the theft of it as a metaphor for her loss of talent.
Then through a circuitous route through many experiences, until at the end of the book, it is back in Paris and Gillian who saw it when she was on a school Art trip, comes across it again.
When she saw it during the school trip to the Tate Gallery, she said to her teacher 'What effect did it have on the people who have looked at it?'
As one of those people, she comes to realise the effect which it had on all the people in its past and she asks 'Don't artists want to put more than the paint on their canvases?'
Although Gwen John painted it 'to keep the world away' and it 'helped others to do the same' yet also, it became an integral part of many lives.
And through reading this book and seeing a small reproduction of the painting on the back of the paperback copy published by Vintage, it becomes a part of our lives as well.
Val De Beer.
Charming and thought-provoking January 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I had never read a book by Margaret Forster before, and am utterly smitten. I am now on the search for other books by her, hoping that this was not a "one-off".
A haunting story, utterly absorbing January 11, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Until now I was never a great fan of Margaret Forster but I found this book utterly absorbing. The effect of a seemingly unassuming little painting on the women whose lives it touches makes fascinating reading. Each of the characters is convincingly drawn and in such detail that, unlike other books of this type where, just as I become interested, the main protagonist disappears from the pages to be replaced by a stranger, here the transition is so seamless that I barely missed the previous character before becoming immersed in the next.
The story is laced with coincidences - generally best avoided in literature as they can seem contrived. The chance of two identical Harrods trunks appearing in lost property at Victoria Station is quite plausible - most travellers returning from Paris to London in the early 20th Century would have passed through Victoria Station, and the stylish traveller would doubtless choose a trunk from Harrods. But the chance meetings between women who owned the painting (I can't say more without giving away details of the story and possibly spoiling it for those who've not yet read the book) could have felt contrived. Instead, they provided a poignant strand linking the women's stories. How little they realised how close they came to the painting they had lost!
For me it was a haunting story that has stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Margaret Forster fans will love it anyway. But if, like me, you have found some of her other work lacking that special 'something', give this book a try. It's special. I loved it and thoroughly recommend it.
Quiet, haunting and gentle January 11, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Everything I have read by Margaret Forster I have enjoyed immensely. This novel is no exception. It tells the story about how a painting was created by the ending of a love affair and goes on to explore the lives of the women who have owned it. The novel, like the painting, is quiet, haunting, gentle and beautiful. Anyone who has enjoyed Forster's novels will not be disappointed with this one. To anyone who has never read anything by this writer, you will enjoy this very much as well as her numerous other novels.
Alone, but not lonely January 10, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book tells the story of a painting, how it came to be painted by a woman living alone in an attic room in Paris and its adventures, the various people who come to own it and the one thing they have in common - they like and wish to be alone, to keep their separateness, their own personality. None of these women are in any way reclusive or selfish, they have relationships, they have friends, they have family, but ultimately realise that they are happy alone.
The painting is by Gwen John, a British painter who died in 1939, sister of Augustus John, about whom I am ashamed to say, I know little. Apparently "Her choice of subject-matter throughout her career remained based on the figure - usually a single figure, and usually a woman in an interior".
The story opens with a young art student, Gillian, viewing a painting in a gallery and wondering about its history. Not the history in a catalogue or book, but its domestic history. Who had owned it? What were the feelings of the people who had hung it on its walls, had they appreciated it or taken it for granted? This is a very intriguing thought. It is well known that Van Gogh never sold any of his painting while he was alive so one assumes they were in a corner unappreciated and ignored. He gave paintings away in settlement of tradesman's bills or just to free up some space in his studio, so what did the recipients think of them? I look at my print of the Yellow Room or Sunflowers and while I love them (Van Gogh is my favourite painter), I am not sure that any recipients of any of his paintings felt that here was a work of genius. They were probably propped up on the mantelpiece or forgotten or used as a doorstop or something of that kind. Would I recognise such a painting if given to me - I very much doubt it.
Margaret Forster has woven a simply wonderful story around this painting. Her last novel Diary of an Ordinary Woman, I found slightly disconcerting as at first appearance it appears a non-fiction book, but then discovered it was not. It had the same mixture of reality and fiction as Keeping the World Away but this time I had no problem with it.
I have been reading Margaret Forster for some forty years now and I think this is her best book yet. I daresay this is because I feel a connection with all the women in this story and understand their feelings which is, of course, is what a book is meant to do, engage the reader and make them feel that the author understands them perfectly across the paperback last week. I am very glad I picked it up.
"It has a history. I don't know what it is, but something is there, more than the paint on the canvas. Don't you think so? Don't artists want to put more than the paint on the canvas?"
One of her best books
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