The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton review – history with a modern-day heroine
n 1686 18-year-old Nella Oortman, a country girl of good birth but straitened circumstances, is married to Johannes Brandt, a wealthy merchant trader twice her age, and dispatched to his luxurious house in Amsterdam. Hopeful of love, Nella is soon disappointed: Brandt is indifferent to her, his domineering sister terse and disdainful. Even the outspoken servants confound Nella's provincial expectations. Lonely and unoccupied, Nella is at first angered by her husband's extravagant wedding gift, a perfect facsimile of her new home in miniature, which she regards as a cruel joke, a mockery of her powerlessness in the household. However, her curiosity piqued by an advertisement, she commissions a miniaturist to create a few small items to furnish the house. The tiny creations she receives are not only exquisite, they bear an uncanny resemblance to their real-life counterparts, suggesting that the miniaturist knows every detail not only of the house itself but the secrets of its occupants.
Jessie Burton's much-hyped debut, which has sparked a publishing feeding frenzy across more than 30 markets, has been compared to Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring. Like Chevalier, Burton is skilled at evoking place. The Amsterdam of her novel is an overripe empire on the brink of rot, the excesses of its prosperity uneasily at odds with its strict Calvinist sensibilities. It is a chilly, secretive city where citizens spy on one another, outsiders are mistrusted and women wear their expensive jewels concealed in the folds of their dresses. Burton's prose is sometimes overwrought but more often she hits her mark: a dog moves through the shadows like "spilled liquid", while the wife of Brandt's business associate "swims in her great skirts" across a room, beautifully capturing both her importance and her impotence. Like Chevalier's Delft, Burton's Amsterdam is a city where a woman's realm is strictly domestic; where, as Nella's mother observes, "life's hard if you're not a wife".
The central premise of Burton's novel, inspired by Oortman's real‑life miniature house within a house, even smaller and more claustrophobic than the original, is therefore an intriguing one and rich with possibility. The three women at the heart of her story, Nella, Brandt's sister Marin and the maidservant Cordelia, are all wholly dependent on Brandt for their survival; obliged to live together cheek by jowl among the shadows of his grand house, they must manage their own conflicting interests by stealth. The miniaturist, by contrast, is a free spirit, an ethereally blond foreigner who not only defies Amsterdam's strict guild system to work at her craft but, more shockingly still, lives alone like a common prostitute. It is no coincidence that her house is at the sign of the Sun. But what is she seeking as she shines her light into the dark corners of the Brandts' lives? Is she a spy, fixed on their downfall, or is she possessed of some kind of magical gift? Are her tiny creations prophecies of the future or, more disorientingly still, does their presence in the house make things happen? Most puzzling of all, just whose side is she on?
Such ingredients promise much but, though there is plenty to enjoy in The Miniaturist, the novel falls frustratingly short of its own potential. Part of this comes from a shift in pace about halfway through the book when Burton, seeking to ratchet up tension, allows the mystery of the miniaturist to drift from the narrative. Instead she pursues a soap opera of a plot that plunders the stock tropes of domestic historical drama, leaving the deeper questions she has raised largely unexplored.
As events engulf them, the characters in The Miniaturist never quite convince. There are some wonderful set pieces, notably a strikingly affecting trial, but while Burton is meticulous in exposing their human failings she is less successful at showing us their hearts: too often they act to serve the plot rather than create it. As for Nella, unlike Chevalier's Griet, she is simply not a creature of her own times. Secular, forthright, resolutely open‑minded even by contemporary standards, she is a modern heroine in period dress. This appears to have been at least in part a deliberate decision by Burton – she has described her novel as a "feminist golden-age fiction" – but by vesting Oortman with sensibilities that match those of our own age, she breaks the hermetic seal of her carefully imagined historical world and, like an oversized object in a doll's house, threatens the integrity of the whole enterprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment