Title: The Improbability of Love (2015)
Author: Hannah Rothschild
Read: 11th-20th May 2016
Genre: contemporary; literary fiction; historical fiction
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Hannah Rothschild’s Bailey’s Prize shortlisted novel is done a disservice by its generic categorisation and cover (as lovely as they all are) and her story unfolds to be much, much more than a love story in the traditional sense. In fact, the novel’s heroine and protagonist is not the “main” character, unlucky-in-love chef Annie McDee, but, rather, the eponymous painting ‘The Improbability of Love’. A character in its own right, the painting is personified and given an omniscient (and witty) voice by Rothschild so it might speak for itself, quite literally, and tell its own story, a tale which is interspersed with the action of the narrative, as both the painting and the narrative slowly reveal its true provenance.
“Let me guess what you are thinking. Girl finds picture; picture turns out to be worth a fortune. Girl (finally) finds boy with a heart. Girl sells picture, makes millions, marries boy, all live happily ever after. Piss off. Yes, you heard, piss off, as the cake tin at Bernoff’s used to say (it was decorated with Renoir’s Les Parapluies, which explains quite a lot).”
After the impulsive purchase of a painting in a junk shop as a present for a man who never shows up for their dinner arrangement, Annie McDee finds herself unwittingly drawn into the art world of London, complete with its Sheiks, auctioneers, oligarchs in exile, and shady dealers. Whilst working as an unfulfilled chef for a director who doesn’t seem to actually direct any films lately, Annie ends up being seconded as a chef to the Winkleman family, art dealer royalty, and it is here that the plot thickens. Annie finds herself tiptoeing into a world that is a lot more dangerous than she could ever have realized; her junk-shop painting turns out to be a lost Antoine Watteau work, and there are many who would pay even more than a small fortune to possess it.
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