About The Book

The Icon Painter

A major new novel, eight years in the making, from the critically acclaimed author of If the Invader Comes and Acts of Mutiny.

The Icon Painter is the product of a deliberate choice to go my own way, rather than follow the market. I knew in my heart when I began that it might have little chance of seeing the light in the current highly commercialised climate of publishing. The very strange thing about its long gestation, however, is that the opportunity to release it electronically has become available in the meantime. That gives me the unexpected chance to publish the book I want to.

Although The Icon Painter is set resolutely in 2012, it returns to an eighteenth century technique, where my career began, in that it echoes the Letter Novel. I’ve done mine via emails, but they’re in normal sentences and not in any of the hasty conventions of emailese. It has already been objected to me that no one writes long emails in this fashion. Yet that is precisely the point of the story. Owen Davy, the painter, the artist, discovers how emails can easily expand to any length their creator wishes. I don’t think he’s alone in this: I’ve certainly written long emails at times and been involved in correspondences where the luxury and speed of the keyboard meant that the word count far exceeded anything I’d ever have done using pen and paper.

I had in mind, too, the enormous and strange expansion of material in Samuel Richardson’s letter novelsPamela (1740) andClarissa (1748), both of which I very much admire, particularly because they study accurately, and from so early a perspective, the horrible consequences of sexual assault. The Icon Painter is also explicitly built on a number of Greek myths and Greek plays, and modelled to some extent on Hamlet. That said, the true genre that organises my book is simply that of the Love Story, the most fundamental of all literary forms. I hope you’ll enjoy it.