A review by gh7
Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding

3.0

I began to enjoy this book more once I started to read it as a fable. Only then did I cease to be irritated by its relentless whispered pretensions of oracular wisdom. It begins brilliantly. The first chapter is fabulously crafted, inspired writing and had me eagerly looking forward to reading all Georgina Hardy’s novels. Almost as if I had discovered a new Michael Ondaatje. Not sure what happened then. The tension of the first chapter punctured, almost as if an apprentice took over, and the writing began to drift off into a self-conscious lyrical anonymity. It’s a narrative of whispers and evasions. Sustaining the implication something very profound is buried beneath its soil. But ultimately I was disappointed to discover it provides only rather clichéd truths about heritage, deracination and war. You won’t get an insightful or even a particularly convincing portrayal of a deaf mute (his lack of speech remained for me little more than a narrative device to sustain the novel’s tactic of evasion), you never quite believe in the mystic revelatory nature of the boy’s drawings – give a child some crayons and they all draw houses and figures that aspire to harmony and security - and you won’t get a convincing portrayal of wartime or post-war Rumania ( the novel could have been set in virtually any European country). Sad to say you won’t even get a poignant ill-starred love story because once again convenient plot devices tyrannise over credible psychological ebb and flow when the girl’s mother takes it upon herself to belligerently intercept the boy’s letters, acting on a primitive kind of reasoning that she will remain mute about. It might be clever if the gesture didn’t seem so forced and out of character. These plot devices begin to grate as if beneath the often fine and evocative prose we’re being duped into following a rudimentary join the dots drawing. Read it as a fable though and you can just about accept the implausible sorcery of the denouement and overlook its pretensions as an insight into the speechless disenfranchisements of war.