For her second novel, following the huge success of The Miniaturist, Jessie Burton turns her considerable imaginative powers towards the 20th century.
The Muse is double-stranded in structure, the plot moving back and forth between 1960s London and Spain 30 years earlier, during the civil war. And at the heart of both narratives are ideas of art, legacy and identity.
In the 1960s, Odelle, a young woman from Trinidad with ambitions as a writer, applies for a job as a typist at the Skelton Institute, a small, upmarket gallery near Piccadilly. The Institute’s curious co-director, an imposing woman called Marjorie Quick, takes Odelle under her wing. An elegant, capable woman in her 50s, she inspires Odelle to have confidence in her abilities as a writer and encourages her to submit some work to literary magazines.
At a party, Odelle meets a young man called Lawrie (who never quite comes alive as the other characters do). He has inherited a painting that he thinks might be of some value and it’s this painting, a striking image of a lion, which has a curious effect on Quick, that connects Odelle’s story with the novel’s second strand, set in southern Spain in 1936.
Olive Schloss, the teenage daughter of a wealthy art dealer, is a skilled painter who has turned down the offer of a place at the Slade. In Spain, she meets another artist, Isaac Robles – passionate, attractive and politically active – and soon becomes close to him and his half-sister, Teresa.
Burton moves between these two timeframes with care and craft. There are parallels and echoes between the two stories. Both feature young women with creative gifts, who, for different reasons, lack confidence in themselves. Burton’s descriptions of doubt and anxiety, about the purpose of art and what it means to think of yourself as an artist, especially as a young woman, are particularly resonant. She is skilled at creating a sense of place, and both narratives speak of considerable research, but the 1960s-set story feels the more taut, the characters more vividly drawn; the scenes in Spain, though in many ways the more intense, are less gripping. Some of the language used to convey the characters’ emotional predicaments feels a little overwrought, but Burton’s imaginative elasticity comes through even when the plot starts to tie itself in knots, as it does towards the end.
• The Muse by Jessie Burton is published by Picador (£12.99). To order a copy for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
