They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.
I stumbled on this title by chance and ordered it second-hand from Amazon. This is a really gripping novel that moves seamlessly through three time zones, each one enriching the others as the story unfolds. A fragment of a stone painting, 17,000 years old, surfaces at a London auction house, kept secret by a British officer serving in France during the Second World War. What happened fifty years ago in occupied France in the Caves of Perigord is about to be revealed.
Each character is well drawn: Malrand, Horst and Chlothilde, for example, and there are light touches in the blossoming romance between Manners and Lydia in contrast to much darker, sombre episodes portrayed during the history of the Resistance.
The undiscovered cave paintings near Lascaux have the last word: portraits of the first children of Perigord, our ancestors, whoever they were, as observed poignantly by an ageing Malrand, for perhaps his last time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment