The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell
I found this disappointing. I hadn't read any of her previous work – Hamnet, for example – but the prizes, glowing reviews, etc had led to high expectations.
This is a tricky story for anyone to deal with, based on the marriage of Lucrezia di Medici of Florence to Alfonso (II) d'Este of Ferrara. The facts are quite well-known: she was barely 15 (he was more than 10 years older) and in less than 18 months she was dead. He had previously been the betrothed of her older sister, Maria, who died.
There are three main ways to approach the story: 1. the historical facts, as far as can be ascertained (relatively dull); 2. the plot of Browning's 'My Last Duchess' (highly coloured, sensational, fictional); 3. something else quite different. Plus, of course, 4. any combination of all these. O'Farrell goes for 4.
Briefly, I was puzzled and underwhelmed by O'F's obviously aspiring to the literary – I found her language simply odd, contrived, in places – at the same time as aiming at a page-turning yarn. Her plot is paper thin and turns on a number of increasingly incredible coincidences. There is one character, key to the plot, who is (to me, anyway) simply unbelievable, but pops up just when required.
For me, she missed the opportunity to use the historical window-dressing simply as a frame for the basic situation: a very young wife who suspects her husband plans to kill her. Instead O'F frequently obscures this under shovel-fulls of (not especially searching) research.
But maybe you'd like it...
) and that's lined up too.
