This review is the fourth in my series of reviews of books from the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist. To see more reviews, please go here.
Okay, so at this point I have come to the realisation that I’m not going to get all of the longlist read by the time the winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Award is announced on June 18. I’m not even going to get all of the shortlist read before that date either. After my initial burst of steam I sort of slowed down a bit, and I’ve been getting distracted and reading other things (more about that later) but I do still want to read all ten of the books on the longlist. Considering I generally don’t read a lot of fiction these days, I have been enjoying these books more than I thought I would. So I will keep going, and I will finish when I finish. I mean, where’s the rush?
Speaking of enjoying things more than I thought I would, that is definitely how I feel about Fugitive Blue by Claire Thomas. Actually I’m not really sure what I expected, but what I found was a thoroughly engaging novel that centres on an unlikely medievel painting and the people whose lives it touches down the centuries. The central story of the book surrounds a present day art conservator who is becoming obsessed with an art work she is in the process of restoring, as her relationship with her partner (and her spare room) is falling apart around her. Interwoven with this story is a series of shorter stories that begin with the painting’s creator and then proceed to follow the painting through different eras, different owners and different countries as it makes its way to present day Melbourne.
My favourite of the short pieces was easily the story of the dancer, and I liked that the reader has to wait until well into the next story to find out which man and ultimately which future the dancer has chosen for herself. The other short pieces are also cleverly written in such a way as to give just enough details to spark the imagination without over burdening the reader with a precise history of everything that has ever happened to the painting and its owners down the years. I felt that the weakest part of the whole book was probably the present day story, and at the beginning I especially didn’t like the way it was written as a sort of letter to an unknown recipient, although by the end I did think that this particular element was brought to a strong enough conclusion that I managed to forgive what I felt to be the initial clunkiness of this device.
Fugitive Blue is Claire Thomas’ first novel, and although there is no mention of her working on a second novel in the author bio that I read, I for one am hoping that there will be one (or a book of short stories for that matter), as I look forward to reading more by this emerging Australian writer.
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