Headlong

From Barnes & Noble

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

What would you do if you found a missing masterpiece in your neighbor's attic -- a Van Gogh, say, or a Picasso -- that no one else knew existed? And what if this neighbor was an unforgivable boor, a wife-beater, and a cheat, and possibly a thief? What if he knew nothing whatsoever about art?

What if he asked you to help him sell a few paintings, this one included?

In Headlong, Michael Frayn confronts an ordinarily sedate British scholar of philosophy with just such a quandary -- and hilarity and mayhem ensue. Martin Clay is supposed to be quietly ensconced in his country home, with his art-historian wife Kate and his baby daughter Tilda, writing a treatise on the role of nominalism in the formation of the art of the Netherlands in the 15th century. But Martin is all too easily distracted from his given course, and when Tony Churt, the ill-mannered and down-on-his-luck owner of the local estate, asks for his advice, he's eager to comply.

The advice, as it turns out, revolves around four paintings that have presumably been in Churt's family for generations, paintings that are awkwardly stuffed in a damp, unused breakfast room. Churt, in serious money trouble, needs to sell these paintings, and hopes that Martin and Kate can appraise them. There is a gargantuan Giordano, which is fairly impressive, but as Martin has never heard of Giordano, he thinks it can't be worth much. There are two smaller 17th-century Dutch paintings, both nice, but both apparently from unknown artists working in the styles of greater artists.

And then there's the last one. Painted on an enormous oak panel that the Churts are using to block the draft from the old fireplace is a scene of springtime celebration -- a scene that, for Martin, is immediately recognizable as the work of Dutch master Pieter Bruegel. More importantly, it seems to be the missing member of a six-painting series, a painting that disappeared over 400 years ago. If this painting is what Martin thinks it is, it will not only make him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but it will also secure his scholarly future.

But there's one catch: First, he's got to get the painting away from Tony Churt.

Thus begins Martin's comedy -- and tragedy -- of errors. In pursuit of his painting, Martin must get past both his doubting wife, who has seen him take on such wild goose chases before, and the amorous young Laura Churt, Tony's neglected spouse. He also has to outwit another scholar, who may or may not be on the case, and out maneuver Churt himself, who might be using Martin in a scheme that is at best fraudulent, and quite possibly illegal.

But Martin must also overcome his own doubts. Could one glance at this painting really have provided enough evidence that it's a Bruegel? And if so, why did this painting disappear?

Headlong follows Martin through his wild-eyed research into the world of the 16th-century Netherlands, a world filled with both religious and political oppression. We learn, as he does, much about art history, and European history, and a bit about classical philosophy. But mostly we watch Martin's breakneck descent from husband, father, and scholar to schemer, liar, and thief, as his passion for this painting overtakes all else around him. As the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition spread across northern Europe, we wonder what lessons, if any, Bruegel's example teaches Martin, and to what extent he abandons the values his study of philosophy has required.

All this is rendered in Michael Frayn's impeccably hysterical prose. Frayn, author of numerous other novels and volumes of non-fiction, is also a playwright, best known for his riotous farce, Noises Off. In Headlong, Frayn turns a satiric eye on both the landed gentry and the scholarly class, exposing both the ridiculousness and the dark underside of each. Frayn's quick wit is matched by his spectacularly-drawn characters, however, and is made all the more poignant by the sense he conveys of the stakes of Martin's story. If the painting turns out not to be a Bruegel, Martin may well have destroyed his entire life for nothing. And if it is -- well, the outcome may be even worse.

"There are some paintings in the history of art that break free," Martin tells us near the beginning of his adventure, "just as some human beings do, from the confines of the particular little world into which they were born." These paintings -- and these people -- often break free for no particular reason. As Frayn reminds us, some of these paintings, and some of these people, achieve fame beyond the circumstances of their origin, but all too often they wind up lost, consigned to the ash heap of history.

—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Michiko Kakutani

Frayn has constructed an ingenious plot around a missing Bruegel painting....It is a story that enables Frayn to showcase his own gift for satiric farce...as entertaining as it is intelligent, as stimulating as it is funny.
— The New York Times

Scott Tobias

Though greed, arrogance, solipsism, and marital strife all play their charged roles in Michael Frayn's Headlong, it's primarily a comic novel about research--not exactly the most tantalizing satirical hook, especially when that research covers topics as obscure as "the impact of nominalism on Netherlandish art in the 15th century." But Frayn, a playwright best known for his seminal backstage farce Noises Off, filters large blocks of historical text through such a cracked, obsessive mind that the story twists into something strangely urgent and compelling. Engaged in the sort of marital rivalry that only academics could comprehend--he's into iconology, while she's into iconography--Martin Clay and his wife escape to a rural enclave outside London to work on their respective books. An unexpected dinner invitation to the rustic estate of crass landowner Tony Churt and his young wife leads to an epiphany when Clay is led through his host's art collection. In a musty breakfast room, collecting soot from the fireplace, sits what he believes is a lost masterpiece, the missing piece in a seasonal panel by 16th-century painter Pieter Bruegel. From that moment on, he embarks on a secret and ridiculously elaborate plan to steal it away from its uncultured owner.

Frayn's startlingly original fusion of suspense, parched wit, and real intellectual rigor would never cohere were he not so attuned to his hero's distortive mind. A classic unreliable narrator, Clay reserves his biggest scams for himself, not only lying about his motivation for taking the piece, but also any evidence in his research that casts doubt over whether it's really a Bruegel. While it's initially disconcerting for Frayn to halt his gripping story with pages of centuries-old Dutch history, Headlong deepens into a sly comment on the pitfalls of high-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty. In the end, what the painting reveals about the man is more important than what the man reveals about the painting.
— The Onion's A.V. Club

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. It is an intellectual comedy, veering occasionally into knockabout, revolving around a philosophical historian, Martin Clay, and his discovery, in the dilapidated manor house of a frightful country neighbor, of a painting he believes to be a missing Bruegel. The comedy arises from Martin's efforts to ascertain its provenance, raise some money for a token payment and somehow spirit the painting away from the churlish Tony Churt, calm the suspicions of his art historian wife, Kate, who is surprised by his sudden interest in her field, and fend off the advances of the highly flirtatious Laura Churt. Frayn is wonderfully funny about English country life, the mustier byways of art history, the art auction business and the deviousness that lurks within apparently mild-mannered art historians. But he has obviously read up extensively on Bruegel, his period and the possible political symbolism of the series of paintings of the seasons to which Churt's picture apparently belongs; and Frayn cannot resist giving the benefits of his scholarship back to the reader, at often exhaustive length, entirely halting his promisingly frolicsome narrative in the process. His attempts to give his lighthearted plot some intellectual weight almost sink the good parts--a pity, since Frayn proves himself again and again a highly civilized entertainer, and the good parts are both funny and true. 50,000 first printing; 7-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

At the heart of this new novel by noted English dramatist Frayn is a dusty painting that bumbling philosopher Martin Clay suspects might be a missing Bruegel. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Freeman

...an excellent holiday escape...With each comedic twist, Frayn's hero wagers all that he has, and much that he hasn't...
—Time Out New York

Paula Harper

Frayn's protagonist dives into fervent art-historical research-from exhilarating hunch to bewildering library work.
—Art in America

Michiko Kakutani

Frayn has constructed an ingenious plot around a missing Bruegel painting....It is a story that enables Frayn to showcase his own gift for satiric farce...as entertaining as it is intelligent, as stimulating as it is funny.
— The New York Times

Kirkus Reviews

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.). Narrator and antihero Martin Clay is a professor of philosophy and amateur art buff, happily married to Julia (herself an art historian), and the doting father of baby daughter Tilda. When the three go on extended holiday in the English countryside, and accept a dinner invitation from insufferably hearty local landowner Tony Churt, Martin's bland life is jolted into concupiscent confusion—for, stowed ingloriously away near some paintings whose value he is invited to judge is the soot-covered find that Martin instantly recognizes as a missing masterpiece executed by 16th-century painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Concealing his excitement, Martin sacrifices his vacation (also further deserting the academic book he's supposedly writing), journeying back and forth to London to research the Dutch master's life and times—meanwhile refining the intricate scam by which he'll spirit away the priceless work that, he assures himself, the oafish Churt cannot possibly appreciate. Following some exhaustively regurgitated arcana, Frayn's plot finally kicks into gear, as Martin's master plan suffers repeated modifications, owing to the canny Julia's suspicions, the seductive mendacity of Tony's young wife Laura, the appearance of "another Churt" (Tony's scapegrace younger brother), and several related accidents and misunderstandings. It's all too little, too late. This otherwise admirably engineered story falls apart because Frayn doesn't seem to have decided whether he's writing a "headlong" intellectual farce, or a complexhomage to a great artist (there's an impressive enormity of both detail and perceptive speculation about Bruegel's sensibility and oeuvre) whose lively paintings are subtly encoded, containing "hidden allusions to persecution" practiced by the Spanish rulers of Bruegel's Netherlands. Art historians will understandably love it. Other readers may find it rather more oppressively educational than entertaining. (First printing of 50,000; author tour)

From the Publisher

"Rueful and amusing . . . Frayn is that rare writer who succeeds as both a novelist and a dramatist."—Randy Cohen, The New York Times Book Review

"Finely wrought and highly comical . . . a perfect introduction to a writer who likes to pull the rug out from under your feet while offering you the most seductive of smiles."—Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

"Exceedingly funny, both in event and in intellectual high jinx."—Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Sunday Globe

"Part detective story, part art history lesson, part cautionary tale, and entirely funny."—The New Yorker

"Frayn isn't stingy, even here, with the laughs, gleefully pricking holes in the overconfidence of academic art criticism. But just below the sugar powder you bite into his tough-minded essay on how history and individual human folly combine and conspire to manufacture art's 'message.'"—Judith Dunford, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Delightful...this novel, deadpan hilarious and wonderfully written, is as effective a work of historical reconstruction as it is a comedy."—David Walton, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Headlong offers an enthralling and refreshingly grown-up take on the alarming speed with which our morals shift to accommodate our desires, and on the lofty and low ways in which the great art of the past continues to affect us."—Elle