Whoever assumed the era of the eye-watering advance for an unknown debut was dead hasn’t been paying attention: Lucy Steeds commanded a six-figure advance and a two-book deal on the basis of her debut novel, The Artist.
A story of subterfuge and deception set in 1920s Provence, it’s told in turn by Joseph, a young journalist writing a portrait of the reclusive genius Tata, and Tata’s niece and general dogsbody Ettie.
It is written in aptly painterly style, the sentences saturated in colour and heat. Admittedly Steeds tells a fairly conventional tale of monstrous male creative egoism and a woman seemingly crushed underfoot.
But beneath it is a more interesting thesis about the relationship between a work of art and the artist that created it, highly pertinent in the age of AI.
