The God of Spring: A Novel

By Arabella Edge

Book Overview

When the French painter Th odore G ricault died in 1824 at the age of thirty-three, he was mourned as one of the most promising artists of his generation. He was also one of the most controversial, endowed with a character marked by Byronic paradoxes. The cult of G ricault's personality cast him as "genius, athlete, martyr, and romantic ghoul." Indeed, it was the stinging aftermath of an illicit affair with his beautiful young aunt that propelled G ricault into the artistic obsession that would yield his masterwork, The Raft of the Medusa. The God of Spring opens in Paris in 1818, as the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration come to fruition in the aftermath of a naval disaster caused by criminal negligence and tinged with political scandal. Mesmerized by the tales of betrayal, madness, murder, and cannibalism aboard the life raft of the scuttled French frigate Medusa , G ricault takes as his muses two of its survivors. His canvas pits man against nature, its dominant image a doomed sailor futilely raising his hand toward the clouds and salvation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743294858
• ISBN13: 9780743294850
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

The throbbing energy of artistic passion

Metaphor, transference and aesthetic sensibilities are paced brilliantly in this second novel by Arabella Edge, who also wuthored the award winning The Company, which described the wreck of the Batavia in the sixteenth hundreds off the coast of Australia, where to this day the once University of Bristol English professor now resides. There are plenty of reasons why Arabella Edge opted to write of a shipwreck once again, likewise in a present-tense, yet no longer a first-person narrative that evokes the perils and the affairs of fate as they are bandied about in a storm of distress. Arabella Edge is able to drive a narrative with effortless imagination, absorbing details while unveiling the fragile subjectivity of the personalities that people the story. The energy of the writing is essential to the portrayal of the passionate genius that in the face of destruction anchors the artistic sensibility of Theodore Gericalt. The tempestuous affairs of the heart are consonant analogues to the tale of betrayal, madness, murder and cannibalism abroad the life raft of the scuttled French frigate, Medusa. There writing and narrative do not pretend to be Conrad-like in the inner nihilisitc distress nor does it assume to navigte metaphysical depths as does MobyDick; however it does stay the course amidst the buffets of fate and chance and allows for the spiritual abyss that leads artistic genius to describe the nuances of the human condition with enough deft and tact to deserve a reading that entertains, astounds and provokes in ways that the best novels manage to. A soulful and gripping tale that paints a picture worth pondering over, while canvassing a portrait of human failings with mythopoetic proportions.