A painter goes blind

I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is called Hélène, then on pages 5, 6, and 7 she is called Helena, then reverts to Hélène for the rest of the book. Why? In the first few pages Peter is in the garden with his daughter while it gets dark. Some time later Peter is painting in his studio when he notices that it is getting dark. This sort of thing keeps happening. Sometimes Christensen surprises us by coming up with the explanation, but all this undermines our willing suspension of disbelief, which he can ill afford, and there are scenes which tax our credulity to the limit — or in my case beyond. There are some ghosts, possibly a bit of madness possibly, and the climax of the plot, like much else, is impossible.

Peter Wihl is a successful painter at work on an exhibition to celebrate his 50th birthday when he has a moment of blindness. The first sentence after the prologue reads, ‘Six months earlier he had lost his eyesight.’ He hadn’t. His dealer takes him to an eye specialist who tells him that he has an incurable disease and will go blind, perhaps in weeks. He runs into a sinister ex-school friend, now an eye surgeon who, after a bizarre reunion of school mates, proposes a solution to Peter’s problem which he goes along with.

I had better say that I am probably too well qualified to give this book a disinterested review, being myself a fairly successful painter who was registered blind in my 50th year, to go totally blind 18 years later (incidentally I am still painting).