"The Age of Light" by Whitney Scharer

 

A fictionalised biography of Lee Miller, a model, photographer, and journalist. It focuses on the three years she spent in Paris as the assistant, student, collaborator and lover of Man Ray but there are also glimpses of the many other aspects of her life.

She must have been a truly remarkable person. She was raped by an uncle, contracting gonorrhoea from the encounter, when she was seven. Her modelling career began with her father taking nude photographs of her when she was a teenager; it took off when, about to step into the road in New York, she was saved from being hit by a car by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue; it ended when a shot of her was used in an advert for menstrual pads. She went to Paris at the end of the 1920s to become an artist and ended up working and living with Man Ray. This was the height of surrealism. She discovered the technique of solarization which became a feature of the photographs of Man Ray and her. (The book credits her with discovering the technique but it would be more correct to say that she rediscovered it, it had previously been described in print in 1859.) The book suggests that she left Man Ray after he claimed credit for some photographs of a girl's head in a Bell Jar (I wonder whether this photo suggested the title of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?) which won a prize; she felt that he was trying to control her. Whilst in Paris she also acted in one of Jean Cocteau's films and modelled for the French Vogue.

Her subsequent career was with the English Vogue. She was first a fashion photographer and correspondent and then a photo-journalist, at first during the London Blitz and then joining the American troops after the D-Day landings. She took a picture in St Malo of the first US use of napalm. She took photographs in the newly liberated Dachau. She had her photograph taken in Hitler's bath on the day he committed suicide. After the war she reinvented herself as a cordon bleu chef and cookery correspondent, marrying the man who founded the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

The novel is written from Lee's perspective, in the third person and using the present tense. This gives us access to Lee's thoughts, while at the same time creating a distance between the reader and the narrator. The principal characters, Lee and Man Ray, are both given depth and nuanced complexity. For all his role as principal antagonist and de facto villain, he is shown to be deeply in love with Lee and he perhaps understands her (especially regarding her father's abusive behaviour) better than she understands herself. 

The final chapter suggests that the pair of them meet in 1974 "forty years since they last saw each other" which heightens the drama but is contradicted by other accounts.

The technique of focusing heavily on three years in a long life makes for an interesting novel but I wondered whether the flashbacks and flashforwards contributed much to the overall book.

Selected quotes:

• “She told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with cafe bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides.” (Prologue)
• “She ... panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.” (Ch 1)
• “Her letters read like excerpts from an Anita Loos novel, full of non sequiturs and gossip.” (Ch 8)
• “The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn't she appreciate it more when she is healthy?” (Ch 9)
• “When I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn't the emotion what makes reality real?” (Ch 14)
• “The Illuminated moths wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer.” (Sussex England)

September 2024; 367 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Click here for an article in the Guardian about Lee's war work (and the war photography of other women).

"Dorian's Journey" by Karena Morgan

This is one of those rarities: a novel set firmly in the real world. No murders, no superheroes, no twisty plots. Just a bunch of people and their relationships. For this it should be applauded. It reminded me of other social realism novels such as Winfred Holtby's South Riding or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

It is a sort of coming-of-age story that follows its eponymous protagonist well into middle age, a little like Lessons by Ian McEwan. Dorian is orphaned as a girl (she misses her mother terribly but her father not at all, perhaps because he "wasn’t exactly oozing sex-appeal but was uncomplicated and trustworthy"; Ch 3) and grows up in a convent. Following some years as a rather old-fashioned single girl, struggling to find a decent man, she marries Harry and moves into the house he shares with his twin sister, Clare, her husband, Andrew, and their son, Charlie, and daughter, Becky. It's almost a commune. But the introduction of the too-perfect-to-be-true Dorian into such a tight-knit community can only have destructive consequences.

The problem with this sort of fictionalised biography is that it is very much one thing after another. While this adds a huge amount of verisimilitude to the book, there is little sense that the plot is developing themes. It is Dorian's 'journey' but it feels a little like a picaresque. Perhaps Charlie is supposed to be the lovable rogue although I positively disliked him.

In my opinion, the greatest weakness lies in the dialogue. There's a lot of rather stilted dialogue in which people lay bare their emotions, setting out the issues that they or their relationships are confronting with honesty and clarity. I don't think people talk like that (outside therapy encounter groups). I doubt most of us even admit those emotions to ourselves, let alone our loved ones. This reduced the feeling of reality that had been built up by the rest of the story. It made the characters feel wooden. Here's an example: "Don't be shocked at what I'm about to say, but if you need a test-drive to put your mind at rest, you'd be safe in my hands. I've been dating an older woman, I enjoy the warm-up and I know what I'm doing. I promise you that I'd voice any concerns, but my gut feeling is that there's nothing wrong with you. I'm not harassing you, don't worry. The ball is in your court now. But if you took up my offer and we were good together, maybe you could consider me as a 'Plan B' if things don't work out for you? I'll still be around." Perhaps this works as a chat-up technique but I can't imagine anyone saying it straight off like that. 

But the pacing is nearly perfect with major turning-points at the 50% and 75% stage.

And I love a novel to be focused on the characters and in this book the major characters are impressively strong:

• Dorian (Dory) is portrayed as Miss Perfect (has she any flaws?) yet she is the disruptive influence whose entry into the family has devastating consequences for the relationships of the other adults. She's Teflon pure and yet there were times when I wanted to throttle her.
• Harry's only real fault seems to be that he is a serial adulterer. Charlie also has multiple partners, but the difference is that Harry is married while he has affairs and Charlie is single and a serial monogamist.
• Clare is rather dour, banning laughter at the dinner table. She is a close observer of the relationship develops between her son and her sister-in-law and she disapproves. She is described as controlling and manipulative but apart from Harry nobody in the family actually likes her. I think she's a victim.
• At the beginning, Andrew is an extremely liberal and open-minded father. He anticipates that his son will want to sow some wild oats, advises the boy how to have sex with multiple partners and stay safe, and even redesigns the family home so that Charlie can smuggle his girlfriends upstairs surreptitiously. He is portrayed as being under his wife's thumb but he is far more on the side of his children. In the end he becomes an old-fashioned patriarch. "I'm the head of this household now and there's no place here for anyone who's uptight and humourless." he tells his wife in chapter 23. Really?
• Charlie is a strange mixture of childish delight and silliness and incredibly mature understanding. He is the unadulterated life-force. "You've gone from a boy with a cheeky grin to a hunky Love-God with the wisdom of Aristotle" Dorian says in chapter 14. Too good to be true! Charlie is obviously intended to be an unflawed hero but there are lots of things I disliked in him. There's definitely a darker side. Despite apparently caring deeply for the happiness of others, what he says and what he does are always aimed at him getting his own way. He lays down ground rules with his sexual partners to separate the physical from the emotional and to ensure that he is always free in his relationships. He calls his mum controlling and manipulative yet he issues ultimatums to both her and his dad: if you don't do what I want I'll move out of the family home. He's a domestic autocrat. I'm not a fan of Charlie.

But the fact that I am so involved in the rights and wrongs of the characters means that they feel real to me and that is a testimony to the quality of writing of this novel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Jeremy was twenty-seven, single and looking for a particular type of woman. He didn’t believe in equality of the sexes and found many modern women too liberal and individual. They unsettled him and brought his insecurities to the surface." (Ch 3) There are moments when the author tells rather than shows.
• "Dorian had done the equivalent of falling for a movie character and thinking she loved the actor" (Ch 3)
• "Her life was standing still but time was moving fast." (Ch 4)
• "Never abandon a good friendship. Romance is fickle, but a really good friend is very precious." (Ch 5)
• "you look like a millipede that's just been told to buy shoes." (Ch 8)
• "'Relationships are complex though. Even steady ones can have a shelf-life.’ ‘Don’t they have two? One ends before the other and someone gets their heart broken." (Ch 17)
• "he had become brutally honest and he would be unlikely to spare her feelings anymore." (Ch 23) There's an awful lot of brutal honesty in this book. None of the characters can resist telling others what they think of them. It's amazing they managed to live together as long as they did. Perhaps the sequel will be a murder mystery. 

One of the best self-published novels I have read for a long time. April 2024; 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God