Seb Kirby - Take No More

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'Take No More' plays out in London and in Florence, Italy, and is a thriller set against double dealing and corruption in the art world.

Much of the background is fact-based. Classical sixteenth century painting masterpieces like Michelangelo's 'Leda and the Swan', Botticelli's 'Portrait of Cosimo Di Medici' or Raphael's 'Portrait of a Young Man' are missing, believed lost or destroyed. The recovery of any one of them would raise fifty million or more. When modern day conservators look at paintings using the latest imaging techniques, they regularly discover beneath the surface the early versions of the work made by the artist as the work was being developed. And occasionally they find something else - a wholly new painting from an earlier period under a more recently painted picture - an underpainting.

In 'Take No More', Julia Blake is a conservator, working with classic paintings. Her expertise includes imaging beneath the surface of paintings to discover what lies beneath. She is sure that a number of those valuable paintings described as 'missing, believed lost or destroyed' have in fact been overpainted as a means of hiding them and preventing their being destroyed when the moral edicts of the past deemed them unsuitable. She has tracked down a collection of pictures in Florence that looks promising and has gone there to use the new imaging techniques to try to discover a hidden masterpiece and make her reputation.

'Take No More' begins when James Blake, Julia's husband, returns to their home in London to find that she has been shot and killed. What had brought her back to London unannounced? Why had someone killed her?

Blake determines to find her killers no matter what. He has little to go on - just her last message to him sent from her mobile phone: 'help me' with an attachment showing Michelangelo's 'Leda and the Swan'. There is no help from the police as he is impeded by the unsympathetic Inspector Hendricks who suspects him of the murder.

Alongside the development of Blake's search for the truth about the killing of Julia - as he follows in her footsteps to the criminal underworld in Florence - the novel develops a number of deeper themes.

The first concerns fathers and sons. Blake himself and Matteo Lando, one of criminals he is forced to confront, share a similar troubled relationship with their fathers. The child is the father to the man. But how far can the father determine the future of the child?

Another theme that emerges is that of the legitimacy of violence. If violence is used to achieve a good end that could not be achieved by any other means, can this be justified? There are parallels here with Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven'.

A third theme concerns the quest for beauty in a corrupting world. There is the beauty of Emelia, one of the victims of the seedy underworld in Florence. There is the beauty of Michelangelo's 'Leda and the Swan', the painting that takes on an increasing importance as the story progresses. How far does the desire to capture beauty degrade and destroy it?

And finally, the issue of mortality. How self-defeating is the impulse in powerful men and women to try to immortalise themselves through art?

Sounds heavy?

It's not. These themes sit comfortably beneath the surface where, in the main development of the plot, Blake faces a dilemma worthy of Harlan Coben that unfolds with page turning intensity.

The plot twists are intriguing. The resolution is necessary. As Raymond Chandler once said: 'At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.'

There is no danger of that here.

A recommended read.

Star rating: *****









Sample the first seven chapters:

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Robert Harris - Fatherland

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'Fatherland' is one of those novels that every writer dreams of – the book that changes everything. Robert Harris went from BBC reporter to world-recognised author in one jump. The well-appointed house where he now lives was 'bought with the proceeds of Fatherland.’ It began a series of successes that took in 'Enigma', a trilogy set in Ancient Rome and culminated in last year's 'The Ghost'. This success is based on a fiction sub genre, what you might call the fact-based thriller.

However, the facts are disrupted by a significant pulse of the imagination. So, in 'The Ghost' a Tony Blair-like politician is writing his memoirs with the help of a ghost writer (as most celebrity memoirs are written, ironically with the exception of Tony Blair's). What would happen if the ghost writer was killed as part of a conspiracy to hide inconvenient truths about the recent past? In 'Enigma' (about the work at Bletchley Park to decode 2nd World War Nazi troop movement signals) what would happen if the events were viewed from the point of view of a fictional young Cambridge academic suffering from nervous exhaustion? And in 'Fatherland' (which concerns a series of murders in Nazi Germany) what would happen if the Nazis had not lost the War and the year was 1964?

This is a different way of writing compared with Stephen King's exhortation to the writer to start with a situation and see what happens (see 'On Writing'). Things must be worked out ahead of time to create more than a situation in Robert Harris' case - the starting point is a whole parallel universe.

And Robert Harris is good at acknowledging the factual basis of his stories right at the start. In 'Fatherland', he refers at the outset to Hitler's real plans to transform central Berlin with larger than life buildings, citing the original documents. And he develops the basis of the conspiracy underlying the dirty dealing that makes up the plot in real, knowable documents and events - particularly the Wannsee conference in 1942 at which the extermination of the Jews in Europe was planned in meticulous detail. Similarly, in 'Enigma' Robert Harris draws on the original decoded signals of the U-Boats held at the Public record Office in London. And in 'The Ghost', he refers to a real handbook on ghostwriting practice.

This could become a mechanical method but Robert Harris' other great merit is the ability to think his way inside the characters he has set into action in these changed circumstances. In 'Fatherland', the central character Xavier March, an investigator in the Kripo (the Nazi criminal police) who investigates the series of murders of high up Nazis that attended Wanasee, does not know about the atrocities that underlie the need for the cover up and struggles to gradually come to terms with the immensity of what that means. A central concern of the book is, then, how can he bring himself to think the unthinkable and realise that in a society that he supports and helps to maintain, people like him have been responsible for mass exterminations. This interior battle forms a strong theme of the book - how does the society that we live in contrive to deny us the truth and win our allegiance when it has carried out grievous acts? Indeed, this returns as a theme to 'The Ghost' with the events this time being the aftermath of the Iraq war.

The final great asset is Robert Harris' gift for describing locations with such ease and in such detail that you really can imagine yourself there. By reading 'The Ghost' you experience Martha's Vineyard in winter in much more detail than was conveyed in the movie version of the book.

While set firmly in thriller mode and offering great entertainment, Robert Harris has found a way of asking challenging questions that will mean, almost certainly, that his work will be of interest long after the current crop of blood-fests and vampire-ins has been forgotten.

Star rating: *****







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