The Russian Master

The Russian Master, by Ian Callinan. Central Queensland University Press, 2008, $32.95.

Davenport Jones, an expert on twentieth-century art, who made his debut in Ian Callinan’s novel The Missing Masterpiece, reappears in this new novel, once again to be battered about by the rapacity and philistinism of the art world as well as the ambitions of a number of assertive women.

It must be a little unsettling to some of Callinan’s colleagues in the art world, where he has been on the board of a number of galleries over many years, that while his novels with legal themes tackle some of the deepest social matters, his two art-world novels have been rollicking comedies verging on farce, in which few characters emerge with credit.

Davenport, despite having made his name by exposing “the fake Divera”, is about to be sacked from his place at an Australian art auctioneers when he is headhunted by a London firm. His wife Gloria has divorced him and gone to India with her lover to stay in an ashram, so he has little reason not to accept, and heads off to London. There, his new colleague Elena immediately takes a fancy to him, and sets about establishing him in an exceedingly expensive flat with the idea that she might soon move in with him.

Although he works for a firm of art auctioneers in an Ian Callinan novel, Davenport’s abiding interest is in art. He is distracted by the window of a London dealer who has a few canvases of Soviet art, and further distracted by the beautiful Olga, the dealer’s assistant, who is the granddaughter of the obscure Russian master of the book’s title, Vadim Kruffinski. He wonders whether there are possibilities for his firm to handle art from the Soviet era.

Olga is determined that she, not her cousin Oleg, should get legal ownership of a Kruffinski painted early in the Second World War. Kruffinski himself is still alive in Russia, but very old and infirm after almost an entire life of maintaining his artistic integrity against the Soviet state. The case is being heard by the Spoliation Panel, a real body that seeks to establish the rightful owners of art plundered by the Nazis.

Davenport attends one of the Spoliation Panel’s sessions, where the painting is displayed. Straight away he is convinced that the painting is a masterpiece: “Kruffinski immediately and completely supplanted the great Divera in his pantheon of geniuses.”

Kruffinski is a sort of profound Rothko. Under the large rectangles of colour is a landscape subtly covered and subtly revealed:

“At the same time as the mind was drawn to the incised figures and buildings in the landscape, the eye was captivated by the luminosity of the overpainting. And when there was the slightest change in the light, the city-scape could be seen to be more than a mere drawing. There were faint tones of pink and brown, and the murky orange of foggy street lights to be seen—the midnight sun behind, and then not seen, as the light changed again.”

There is a painting in this style on the book’s cover, one of the most apposite illustrations one is likely to see on the cover of a novel.

Once the news of the Spoliation Panel’s decision is made public, everybody wants all the Kruffinskis they can get their hands on, and the race is on to cultivate the dying artist. Davenport is sent to Russia for this purpose, while Olga and her boss are determined not to be left out, and before long Davenport’s boss, as well as his wife Gloria—who has decided to try to win Davenport back—and her new boss, a millionaire popular novelist, also try their luck at the increasingly crowded dacha outside St Petersburg where the artist lives. But Kruffinski is not as infirm as everyone believes …

Further information would spoil the ending. Callinan is an old-fashioned novelist, working chronologically, providing the information the reader needs, keeping his story moving and his situations and characters plausible.

Unfortunately it needs to be said that the novel seriously lacks old-fashioned editing. One must allow for the odd mistake in a book, but here the annoyances are simply too many. They include mis-spellings (“Marshall Zhukov”, “ringing its hands”, “Alma Tadana”, “canvasses”), parentheses that begin with a dash but end with a comma (as in the passage quoted above), quotations that don’t close, characters whose names change, redundancies, and one character who is introduced at length in the opening chapters but never appears.

George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.