Читать книгу Girl With a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier - Страница 8

I’ve been trying to analyse what makes this novel so successful – a veritable work of art.

I feel that two things are key: the pace and the form.

Much is made, in the book, of the fact that Vermeer painted slowly – too slowly for the whims of his family, who waited so impatiently for works to be finished and to be sold for good money. It seems to me that Tracy has made a beautiful virtue out of this slowness in the shaping of her novel. Things unfold in a calm, unhurried and uncluttered way. The narrative has almost a shy coyness about itself, willing to give us only so much at any one time to lure the reader deeper and deeper into the story. It moves at Vermeer’s pace. But, just as we are confident that the artist is embarked on works of great beauty and stillness, so, here, we see the author quietly bringing to life a delicate human drama.

How Tracy controls the form is complex. It relates, once again to Vermeer himself and the gentle way in which the innocent maid, Griet, begins to understand his technique, which is unhurried and arduous. He moves people, objects and furniture around until he has found the combination that feels right to him. And Tracy does the same, giving us ever-changing alignments of the circumstances and the people who are going to shape Griet’s destiny. When Vermeer begins to paint, he does surprising things, laying on dull backgrounds before beginning to sketch in the figures. He explains to Griet that the colour white is almost never ‘pure’, but brought to purity, and brought to its crucial role in a painting (eventually the earring itself) by the presence of other tones within it.

And this is how Tracy shapes her narrative – by small, unexpected increments, often defined by colour (the red of the butcher’s blood under Pieter’s nails, the cloudy white of the laundry, the Delft blue of Griet’s father’s tiles, the flaming tones of Cornelia’s hair) laying them in sparingly and – most crucial of all – never anticipating for us too neatly what role they are going to play.

Tracy always researches her books very thoroughly. To write about quilt-making she makes quilts. To write about fossils, she gathers and studies them, thus giving great authenticity to the work. But in Girl with a Pearl Earring we experience a lot more than a feeling of a writer doing meticulous homework; we are led deep inside the strange, closed world of the artist and the innocent girl who, for a brief moment, moved him to a love he could only express through a picture. We are as captive to that world as Griet is captive to her master. This is one of those rare novels where all the decisions made by the author appear inevitable and right. And millions of readers agreed. They were perfectly at home in this book. They felt they were part of a timeless painting.

RT. 2018