Tiepolo Blue: 'The best novel I have read for ages' Stephen Fry

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Although don was a remarkably pompous and unlikeable character to begin with, you grow to both love and respect him as he flounders through life with gross naivety.

How to rate an unfinished novel? I recognized good penmanship and the narration was great. But the story is so depressing I dislike it. The foreboding feeling when following Don's lonely life, manipulated by a villainous character, was too strong for me. Don is a naive idiot and I don't want to know more about his life after listening 50%. I was waiting for the love interest but am afraid that will end depressing, too. This is a story of a man who has for most of his life to date preferred the hallowed halls of Cambridge University, rather than embracing the wider world and allowing himself to grow as a person. Literally pushed out into his new job by Val, he is like a man sliding around on an ice rink, away from the rarified atmosphere of Cambridge. His points of reference are skewed, he has little to anchor himself. Until now he has not bothered to engage with everyday life – he has had no real need – but something is stirring within him and he needs to identify what it is.As someone just graduating from a degree in art history and beginning my forays into the world of art and academia in London, I found it particularly entertaining as I could recognise so much within the people, places and quarrelling relationships that Cahill captures. Truly fantastic. When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don’s abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho.

He has written for publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. [2] A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable' Financial TimesDon Lamb, distinguished professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the protagonist of Tiepolo Blue, is only forty-three, but while reading the novel I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. The professor is fusty beyond his years: he sees himself as a noble defender of the classical tradition, a crusader against those academics who concern themselves with the ‘fashionable irrelevances’ of ‘society, politics or psychology’ rather than ‘the fundamental things: proportion, light, balance’. There is no shortage of public figures expressing similar views nowadays, but James Cahill has chosen to set his arresting debut novel not in the midst of today’s so-called culture wars but in the 1990s, with the influence of ‘that dreadful man Jacques Derrida’ fresh in the memory and the term ‘political correctness’ newly in vogue. The writing, when talking about Art History, Cahill’s area of expertise, is convincing, even beautiful at times. But when he talks about the London art scene and gay scene, in fact most things out of the realm of classical art, it came across as naive and cliché. Perhaps Cahill is almost as out of his own depth in these worlds as his protagonist? Original: The writing was great, sometimes so good that I felt like I was wearing the skin of the protagonist which I disliked so much. Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge' Michael Donkor, Guardian also besides the book not being very fun (which is sad for me but fully understandable if that's not the book's aim) it is also not very sexy. bathhouse scene B+ but it comes too suddenly. it's not a 'simmering closet case sexual awakening' book, but if you're gonna do sad man sexual failure being dumped in it by his unrequited loves, it's weird to combine that with a few elements of simmering closet case sexual awakening that don’t fully come together.

Don is detestable at first: I was worried I wouldn't relate or feel close to him at all, but the character development!! The confidence of Cahill’s sex scenes is worth mentioning too. Occasionally, perhaps in seeking to mirror the rich elaborateness of the artwork Don is researching, Cahill’s descriptions have a slightly melodramatic flavour. In his writing about physicality and bodies combining, however, he beautifully captures disorientation, tenderness and heat without tipping into excess. The embodiment of the verve and unpredictability of this cityscape is artist Ben, a mercurial enfant terrible who breezily challenges Don’s dusty wisdoms, shows him the delights of Soho, takes him to openings of provocative and punky exhibitions. He instigates in Don “a mental rewiring, a vital recalibration”. Occasionally, I wondered if Ben was rendered as sufficiently charismatic to justify Don’s attentions and ardour. What is powerful here, however, is Cahill’s charged depiction of Don’s psychosexual awakening. Don’s desire for Ben is presented as distorting, dangerous, strange – capable of undoing the new life Don is trying to establish for himself in London. Tiepolo Blue comes trailing clouds of glory. Clouds borne by winged putti, perhaps, to fit its subject matter; I have rarely seen a first novel by someone who is not already famous puffed so much with pre-publication quotes by people who are. This would be fine if the novel were a work of great talent but, while not actually bad, I am not sure it fulfils its promise. The plot: Professor Don Lamb is an art historian at Peterhouse, Cambridge’s oldest and weirdest college. (The name “Don” is deliberately unimaginative.) An expert on the great Italian painter Tiepolo, about whom he has been writing the definitive work for years, he has lately been outraged by a permanent exhibition of modern art on the lawn of the College’s main court (Old Court, fittingly). Cahill was born in London. [1] He earned a degree in Classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a master's degree in Contemporary Art from the Courtauld Institute. [2] In 2017, he completed a PhD in Classics at Cambridge University. [2] He is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King's College London. [2]It could be that his faithfulness to his studies at an age when he should have been experiencing sexual awakening has largely been the cause of this naivety. Later on, when we meet him, he is going out into the world to crash into a sort of mid-life-latent-adolescent crisis that he nevertheless embraces with poise, shored up by his understanding of classical art and its history.