A trick of the light

There is a moment at the start of most authors’ careers when it is hard to get anything published, and there is a moment towards the latter stage of some authors’ careers when it is hard to stop everything being published. A.S. Byatt is in the latter stage of her career, and however great the claims for her back (and future) catalogue may be, it hard to see why Peacock and Vine came to be here.

Byatt begins with an insight at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Unfamiliar with the work of Mariano Fortuny, she describes something in the quality of the April light which brings to mind a very English green and thus William Morris. From this pleasant whimsy Byatt creates an essay that meanders through some connections between these men. These are not many.

Fortuny was born in Granada in 1871, 37 years after Morris’s birth in Walthamstow. Both men were innovators not only in design but associated realms. Morris’s founding of the Kelmscott Press and Fortuny’s innovations in lighting can be slightly compared. Both were interested in the Nordic myths — Fortuny through his admiration for Wagner, Morris very much not. At the entrance to the salon of the Palazzo Fortuny is a painting of the Valkyrie, Siegmund and Sieglinde. In Morris’s garden at Kelmscott is a topiary representation of Fafnir the dragon. Such facts do not quite an essay, let alone a book, make. By half way through this short work the author is wandering off into summaries of the work of various antiquarians and anthropologists with only very slight connections to either Fortuny or Morris.

Soon she slips into a pleasant meander among the byways of her subjects. Much is made of Proust and D’Annunzio’s mentions of Fortuny garments in their novels.