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Loading... Headlong (1999)by Michael Frayn
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.   JimandMary69 | Aug 21, 2023 |   ) Triduana | Jan 25, 2022 |  ) Ma_Washigeri | Jan 23, 2021 | On arrival into the country they are invited to have dinner with their neighbours, the Churts. The Churts' estate is run down and Tony Churt is seemingly always on the lookout on ways to make quick bit cash, and has an ulterior motive in asking them over. Tony wants the Clays to have a look at some old paintings that he wants to unload. He doesn't trust the big auction houses and hopes the Clays can give a valuation and find a way of selling them without him having to pay fees or commission. There is a huge and ghastly picture by Giordano that Tony and three minor Dutch scenes. However, it is last painting that Martin is shown that he becomes really interested in. He believes that this a missing masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel. Afraid that the Churts will simply sell it to the highest bidder and that it will disappear in to a private collection somewhere abroad and wanting the renown as it's discoverer, Martin decides that he won't tell the the Churts what he suspects and hatches a plan to get it for himself. Martin's wife Kate isn't convinced about it's authenticity so he sets out to prove his theory whilst at the same time trying to figure out how to get Tony to part with it without arousing his suspicion. Martin thinks that Tony is just a gullible country bumpkin but he soon learns that he more devious than he initially thought. To complicate matters even further Tony's wife, Laura, starts to make sexual advances towards Martin which only puts further stress on the Clay's own marriage. The story quickly turns into a rather simple and rather entertaining little farce running alongside a more serious examination into the painter's life and the circumstances that might have led to this particular piece of work's disappearance, along the way giving an insight into a turbulent period of Dutch history. One that I for one knew nothing about. The overall plot is perhaps a little thin and slightly out of balance (a little too weighted towards the art history) but on the whole I felt that Frayn juggled these two very different story-lines extremely well. The farce element kept me amused whilst the theories and history made for fascinating reading. The ending when it arrived was well executed and overall I found this a brisk and entertaining read that,if asked, would certainly recommend it. (  ) PilgrimJess | Aug 22, 2020 |  ) bringbackbooks | Jun 16, 2020 |
 "A formidably learned, unfortunately ponderous comic romp from the British playwright (whose Noises Off is a contemporary classic) and novelist (Now You Know, 1993, etc.)." Headlong is built on this kind of premise, a dizzying vision or speculation which takes over the whole modest world of the central character. He is Martin Clay, a philosophy lecturer on sabbatical, diligently avoiding work on the book he is supposed to be writing on nominalism, and he is convinced that his disorderly neighbour in the country has, but doesn’t know he has, a lost Bruegel among the mountains of family junk in his rotting ancestral pile. The trick is to remove the painting from its owner without letting him know what he’s got, and this is how Martin thinks he will do it. It’s a piece of accelerated delusion. Groucho would have been proud of him. "Frayn, a highly successful playwright (Noises Off) as well as a novelist of note (A Landing on the Sun; Now You Know), is an odd combination of skilled farceur and scholar, and these strands in his work seem somewhat at odds in this new novel, his first in six years." Martin's scholarly detective work is the heart of the story, putting it in a genre that includes A. S. Byatt's ''Possession,'' Carol Shields's ''Swann'' and Tom Stoppard's ''Arcadia.'' In the course of Martin's researches, we learn a great deal about Bruegel and the Netherlands of the 16th century -- political struggle, Spanish imperialism, the Inquisition. Frayn presents many intriguing theories of Bruegel's relationship to his time: did he simply ignore it -- art as escapism? Did he propagandize? Did he conspire with the nationalists? Did he collaborate with their oppressors? Or was he, as Martin briefly considers, ''a hired hack of the Counter-Reformation?'' That this research is so exciting is Frayn's great triumph. He's made a funny, fast-moving book out of a man reading other books.  This intersection of the art market, the class system, and what might be termed the English or British character furnishes an ideal locus for Michael Frayn. In his essays and in his plays and screenplays (Noises Off and Clockwise being notable here) he has raised an edifice of gentle but by no means innocuous satire of his fellow countrymen... The great secret about the English rural idyll – an idyll most harshly dissipated in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs – is that the bucolic scene is very often one of cruelty, surliness, and resentment, rife with nbreeding and inefficiency, and populated quite largely by people who would, had they only the talent or the resources, do anything to sell up and move to the city. (Without elaboration, Martin alludes to ‘the lake that collects in the dip by the wood where we found the dead tramp’.) We are, in any case, very swiftly presented with a truly rebarbative example of the squire at his worst. AwardsDistinctions
A British comedy in which academic Martin Clay is asked by a boorish country squire to assess his paintings. Clay spots what he suspects is a Bruegel and so begins a tale of lies and concealment as he schemes to separate the painting from its owner. By the author of Now You Know. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.58)
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