Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

 Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder)

On the evidence of Hamnet and now The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell exemplifies everything one could want from fiction to make reading the great pleasure it can be at its best. Yes, George Eliot, the accessible James Joyce, Julian Barnes, Thomas Hardy and any number of others but, coming straight out of this book so deeply impressed, it's hard to think of anybody whose prose is quite such a champagne experience to be immersed in.

It is in the very writing. Quite how profound it is, I'm not so sure. On the face of it, the story of Lucrezia, the teenage bride made Duchess of Ferrara, as a substitute, in 1560, isn't much more than Henry VIII all over again. It might not be more more than a cimplistic feminist tract in which our sympathies can only be with her innocence, fragility and artistic talent isolated and at the mercy of the wicked Duke, Alfonso, his need to produce an heir, political expediency, his unremitting ruthlessness and uncaring cruelty. Lucrezia's life doesn't count for much to him and is soon in the way whereas, like any such tyrant, it can't be his fault that no heir is forhcoming even though we can all see he's firing blanks. And, we understand, not only in her direction.

It might be possible to read the book from the sort of Clarksonian, Trumpian, Boris Johnsonian and Henry Tudor point of view that says, no, women are accoutrements of only limited use but it would be a radical interpretation. We don't need to be convinced of any moral rights and wrongs because the prose is alive, or pulls off the legerdemain of seeming to be, in all its sensuous gorgeousness and that is what convinces and would be the point of reading it ahead of any taking of sides that we are given little choice about.

As with Hamnet, I had thought that fact and fiction were two different things, and opposites, that shouldn't be mixed together. Stories are surely one or the other. But that's not right and I've changed my mind. All history is partly fiction, coloured by those who wrote it, interpretated as they saw it and filled in with detail that 'must have been' or 'might have been'. And fiction has to be based on something real, or relate to it, or else it would be meaningless, recondite and do nothing for us at all.

Maggie's 'author's note' at the end sets out exactly how she adjusted her source material to make her story, maybe via Robert Browning's My Last Duchess which forensically justifies what she's done just in case there were any doubt. I'm no longer convinced there are such 'facts' as pure, reliable history. Certainly not having lived through the Trump-Johnson Axis. I'm not sure there's pure fiction either. Maybe I could have worked that out for myself before but it is The Marriage Portrait that brings it so readily into focus.

But even that is not the main point. It's a thriller, compelling not only in its exciting finish - and I'm sorry to say that some minor characters have to be routinely or mistakenly murdered as collateral damage- but for the sheer thrill of how it does, honestly, transport the reader into its world. As has happened a few times before, I raced through the last pages like a dog bolting its food so greedily that more enjoyment could have been had by savouring them but, what can you do.

There is a trick to it, a technique, and it might be one that only a writer born to be such could pull off without missing a beat. I'd be very sad if Maggie O'Farrell had been taught how to do it on a creative writing course. I hope it qualifies as serious 'literature' and it's surely better than genre 'historical fiction' but I also hope such books fly beyond any such categories and are simply 'any good'. I can hardly imagine a reader who would not enjoy it. I would feel sorry for any who didn't. 

The wonderful Library Service provided it. For all that the general prognosis on almost every issue in the world is bleak, we at least still live in a country that not only will do that for us but the NHS are determined to keep us alive as long as they can so that we can take advantage of it. It would be a dire and dismal soul who found reason to complain about that.