The Bellini Madonna

Author: Elizabeth Lowry
By Quercus Publishing Plc
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Editorial Review
Product Description
A very funny debut, which marks the arrival of a major new talent, and a multi-layered detective story wrapped in a caustic confession, The Bellini Madonna is complex and ultimately tragic story that plays with art, poetry and history.

Customer Reviews

Delicious, but ultimately disappointing, 2009-09-12
This book completely bowled me over for the first 250 pages. There's a lot to admire, and I could sense the relish with which Elizabeth Lowry must have written it. It fizzes with energy. Some reviewers have criticised the 'overwrought' language, and I can see what they mean; just occasionally it irritated me, too. (Finding it necessary to describe a garden as 'green' is a case in point! Better judgement was needed in terms of what to omit.) And yet it wasn't inappropriate for a narrator as bombastic as Thomas Lynch, and mostly it was pure delight. Here are some examples of the imagery that packs the pages. If they do something for you, you'll at least enjoy the prose:

* describing a vacuum cleaner: "a psychedelic machine, covered in neon plastic piping, which sat lifelessly in the kitchen like a clone of the Pompidou Centre."

* "Here was a dressing room smelling of senile face powder; a modern built-in wardrobe sheltering an arthritic wire hanger, and an upended white melamine footstool with stiff dead legs. A William Morris paper of morose willows was losing its grip on the wall."

* "I can see her heart through my closed lids, the berry-like heart of a seahorse [...] a doll's purse of crimson threads, cradling its miniature throbs."

It's a book for those who like to wallow in rich description. If you don't, it would drive you nuts.

Some have expressed astonishment that this is a first novel. I agree up to a point, but there were too many respects in which the author showed inexperience. The pacing was a problem: the mysteries of the location of the painting and the nature of the characters' relationships and motives were so static that by the time they were resolved I'd lost interest; the extracts from the diary found by Lynch are too similar in tone to his own voice to be persuasive; and I didn't care enough about the characters (I don't need to like characters to enjoy reading about them - far from it - but I do need some kind of emotional engagement). It's also unwise to introduce superb characters and then dump them: Ludovico Puppi and Maddalena Roper were hilarious, and seethed with malevolence, but sending them off-stage early on left me with withdrawal symptoms.

That said, it was a rattling good read until it wore me out in the final quarter, and I've rarely been so excited by a first novel in terms of its promise for the future. So I eagerly await her next one. I just hope it's tighter and more satisfying, without losing any of the astonishing verve and beauty of this first attempt. Give it a try. The language, characterisation and mischievous humour are wonderful, and you might even enjoy the resolution more than I did.

An intriguing debut mystery for art-lovers, 2009-07-20
There have been many novels about the search for missing art masterpieces, but none as convoluted as this one. It's written totally in the first person as a confession by Thomas Lynch, a randy old professor of art history who is an expert the renaissance masters, in particular Bellini. Disgraced from his college, he goes on the hunt for an uncatalogued Bellini Madonna which leads him to a mouldering old English Manor House - Mawle.

He invites himself to stay with the Ropers, the house's owners to catalogue their art, but really on the hunt for the Madonna - but no-one is sure if it really exists. He dreams of stealing it away to 'find' it again and make his fortune. Maddelena Roper is a widow but dashes off back to Italy, leaving Lynch under the care of her daughter Anna who is also looking after a rather strange little girl Vicky.

From the moment they meet, a game of cat and mouse ensues between Lynch and Anna. At first he worries about outstaying his welcome, but then he finds the lost diary of former owner of the house James Roper who was on the grand tour with Robert Browning and meets the family who a reputed to own the painting - this is the clearest clue yet to the work's existence. Anna though seems to be encouraging him to stay and he starts to feel a strong attraction to her. But who is manipulating whom? There are so many questions to answer ... Will Lynch find the Madonna? Will Anna succumb to him? Why does she stay in this old house? Just how does the child Vicky fit in? Why are they happy to have this stranger in their midst?

None of the characters are likeable at all, but we do grow to understand them as the truth is revealed little by little and we find out their own stories and, through the diaries, that of Anna's ancestor. Lynch's language is elaborate and rather over-wrought, but you really can sense the run-down house and the dusty treasures it may contain. The story requires concentration with the flowery prose, and it takes its time in building up the tension in a rather leisurely way. It is only in the last fifty pages or so that things start to become clear as the pace heats up towards the climax. As a debut novel it is remarkably complex and defies neat categorisation. I'm not convinced that telling the story purely from Lynch's point of view works completely, alternating between Anna and him could have upped the underlying sense of mischief (it puts me in mind of the film 'Sleuth [DVD] [1972]'). It was certainly intriguing and will make you look at some of the renaissance masters with a renewed interest. (3 1/2 stars)

Smart Gothic tragicomedy, 2009-07-02
I loved this book and it stayed with me a long time after I'd finished it. It wasn't always an easy read but that was kind of the point - I kept feeling that the style was challenging me to look at how it was written, and by doing this it was making a statement about how we see things and describe them - about art. I also felt it was definitely trying to challenge Gothic conventions, invoke the Gothic genre and then kind of tease us with it, pull the rug from under our feet, and I liked the cleverness of that.

The characters were often grotesque but that was part of the whole effect. The narrator, Tom Lynch, was really intriguing. At first I found him off-putting, but as the story went along I could see his scars and what made him the way he was, and by the end he had totally won me over. That was quite something for the author to pull off I thought. I found Anna, the girl he loves, tragic but also very funny and the dialogue between them very well handled. The mix of comedy and tragedy throughout the book was actually both strange and amazingly moving. I also enjoyed the evil mother, Madalena, and kept wishing she would come back.

This book actually disturbed me quite a lot because its emotions kept shifting around and I had to keep revising my view of the characters, and in that way it's a lot like life. It's a sophisticated read, a bit special, definitely thought provoking.

overwordy, 2010-06-27
there is so much 'description' in this book it seemed to clog it up, and became frustrating to read.I found the main character unlikeable, and it was hard to have any sympathy for him. If i hadn't been reading it for my bookclub i probably would have stopped reading it! After half way through i did start to want to know what happened to the Bellini Madonna.although there is some satisfaction in knowing that, it didn't make a wholesome read, and i still felt annoyed with it as a book.

Her Master's Voice, 2009-10-07
At first, I thought that I had strayed into a novel by James Hamilton-Paterson (`Cooking with Fernet Branca' etc.), but I soon realized that Ms Lowry strove for much more than flippancy and was busy worshipping at the altar of a much grander deity called James, i.e., Henry James.

Thus, the book comes with much that endears Henry James to some and makes him loathsome to others, i.e., exquisitely crafted, though at times enervatingly oblique or even pretentious prose and a plot that unfolds at the utmost leisure and at times seems to be more or less treading water. There is, of course, something very un-Jamesian about the generous helpings of sex; healthy reminders that we live in a age of fewer inhibitions; though I could well have done without another variation on the perennial evergreen of Roman catholic clerics abusing children.

And though I was soon aware that the epithet `thriller' used in one of the rave reviews on the blurb is wildly off the mark, I would have wished for something more of a surprise in the course of the book's denouement. On the other hand, the atmosphere of gloom and failure pervading the last pages is undeniably impressive.

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The Bellini Madonna