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Based on a poem, based on a portrait of a young woman forced into a courtly marriage, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel The Marriage Portrait is arresting, terrifying, and lush. It’s an amalgam of historical fact, layered analysis, playful imaginings, and rich observations. Like her earlier novel Hamnet, she breathes life into things we may already know, but from an angle we don’t expect. The young woman in question is Lucrezia de Medici, who married the Duke of Ferrara in 1558. She died in 1560, and it was rumoured that she had been poisoned by her husband. Hamnet took the reader hook, line, and sinker. It was vivid and compelling from start to finish. The Marriage Portrait is just as inventive, and convincing, but asks us to delve close to Lucrezia’s experience, which is at times grueling (yet we love her for her passion, quick intelligence, ability to dream and comprehend beauty in both the ordinary and extraordinary), and we, as the reader, ‘see’ the machinations of the court as well as the Duke’s subterfuge all too clearly, while the girl/young woman which Lucrezia is cannot ever hope to understand. Despite her experience as a daughter of a powerful count and alive to the necessities of the arranged political marriage, her naivety is wrapped in her desire to avoid such manipulations and to see the world as a place of beauty and surprise. O’Farrell’s Lucrezia is a free spirit (one that will be broken) — as a child in the Medici household her eccentricities are tolerated and her love for art is allowed to flourish. She is in a privileged position and only the sudden death of her elder sister turns the tables on her fortunes. The Duke is beguiled by her beauty, and possibly her simmering wildness — something that a powerful man may be drawn to as well as wish to control. For this is a novel about control — control of a woman; the need for a legacy (for to have no issue is a problem for the Duke with plots all about him); control of his own desires with his loyal and cruel Leonello; and control of his temper, which fluctuates between stifling admiration and a dangerously quiet force. O’Farrell introduces us to Lucrezia as she is suffering and in fever. She has ridden with Alfonso, the Duke, to a lonely and remote fortress. She is sick and distressed, but awake to her death. Yet she rages against it all, summoning up the strength to meet the painter who has ridden furiously after them in demand of his coin and a portrait under his arm. We will not meet this scene of a beaten-down Lucrezia looking upon her former more robust self until the closing chapters. From these devastating opening pages, O’Farrell takes us back to the home of her childhood, slipping unnoticed in back passages, lost in drawing and painting, tutored alongside her brothers, and fascinated by her father’s animal menagerie. A child who did not fear the tiger, who walked the ramparts, and was always where maybe she shouldn’t be — yet loved in all her oddity and admired for her skill. Married life changes this — expectations grow, and while Alfonso pours attention on her, there is a tension bristling not far from the surface. Using lush language and rich descriptions of cloth and jewels, of gardens and forests, of the courts with their dance and song, O’Farrell paints us her own canvas of both beauty and its flipside, an ugliness that even an innocent young woman can not be impervious to. As the bonds tighten and strangulation through illness or at the hands of the handsome Alfonso seems certain, nothing is certain and yet a fevered Lucrezia may find a way out of her dilemma — an escape that releases her from her contract, that makes the marriage portrait a distant memory. |