The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell

 You know that when you get your hands on a book by Maggie O’Farrell, you’re in capable hands. There are some writers who inspire an implicit confidence that when you pick up their work you just know it’s going to be good.

 It seems to be quite in vogue for authors of historical fiction to take, perhaps, a lesser-known person from history and using the known facts create an illuminating fiction around them. I can think most recently of Elizabeth Fremantle with Disobedient, which tells of Artemisia Gentileschi. Maggie O’Farrell has taken Lucrezia Medici and catapulted her short life into a wider consciousness with this enthralling story

16th century Italy is recreated down to the last detail and is a testament to the extensive research that must have taken place. We are there with Lucrezia from her conception almost and we’re rooting for her all the way. She is a maverick amongst her siblings, unique, intelligent, and alert to the cunning machinations of the Italian Renaissance Court. So many royal marriages in times gone by were arranged and purely political and it was nothing for a groom to marry another sibling if the first intended expired. Such is the case here when the very young Lucrezia marries the Duke of Ferrara.

A finely honed imagination is at work here and that combined with the historical research and the sparkling narrative produces an absolutely enthralling story that I don’t think you’ll want to put down once you start it. The book was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was a Guardian Book of the Year and a Reese’s Bookclub pick. And it’s easy to see why.

The story was inspired by Robert Browning’s poem, the Last Duchess. and O’ Farrell uses this as another ingredient in this recipe for Renaissance reverie. At times, there is a curiously fairytale sense as we navigate the narrative,  indeed, Lucrezia’s father has a menagerie in the bowels of his palace, and the very young Lucrezia has some kind of bond with the captive tiger, a metaphorical empathy, perhaps?  And if Browning was writing a poem about a portrait, O’ Farrell has created a portrait of words, an animated landscape almost, the visual quality of the writing is intense.

It’s a novel of high quality, rich, one of those books that fills you up to overflowing with the glorious prose and leaves you slightly deflated when you come to the end. (Although the end was a corker, let me just say!)

My thanks to Tandem Collective for a gifted copy of this book. And I can only apologise for being late with my review.