The Music Lesson is a clever book - the cleverness begins with the cover, which depicts not Vermeer's “The Music Lesson’, but a detail from his ‘A Lady Writing A Letter’. Her hand holds her quill as light spills onto her; in the full painting she looks at the viewer in much the same way as the woman in the painting in the story looks at Patricia Dolan, our central character. Perhaps Weber is regarding us to see if we get it, her little dance with ‘facts’ in this novel. She asks us directly “But what is the “real” truth of anything?” and lays the challenge: “A mind has meditated to conceive it, and minds must meditate to understand it.”So, there it is - on one level this is a quick read about a 41 year old woman in her mid-life, going through the motions of life. She’s an academic woman, an art historian at the top of her game, but who’s life is as much under glass as any precious relic. She is stuck in grief, living her days as if she is a ghost. Until one Michael O’Driscoll arrives in her life. He is the embodiment of her Irish heritage, largely theoretical up until this point, a cousin come to claim her. Weber has a little riff on the way our ancestry may be draped around us like the king’s cloak, but it is’t particularly alive in us until, or unless, something comes along to make it so. Michael, Micky, Mix (it gets shorter as they become more intimate) transports Patricia Dolan out of her miserable self and all the way back to Ireland - we learn why in reverse, as she meditates, alone, in her little Irish cottage in Cork. Patricia has fallen involve and Mix ( good name for him) is a shady character who, it turns out, belongs to the IRLA (read IRA). He has been radicalised since boyhood, and is ruthless in pursuit of the cause - and he has seduced her into becoming involved in a plot to steal the Queen’s Vermeer, a work called ‘The Music Lesson’. There is an actual Vermeer called The Music Lesson, but it isn’t the one here. This one is fictional, but is a lot like ‘The Guitar Player’ which was indeed stolen in 1974 by an academic women from a privileged English family, who fell involve with an IRA member and who stole it. As was the case with the real one, the decision is made to burn it, as a show of force and symbolism. The madness of extremism is contained in this part of the plot, and here ‘reality’ and fiction part company since our Vermeer meets a different fate. The real thief, Dr Rose Dungale (later Brigid Rose Dungale) was thoroughly radicalised and went to prison for six years. Our Patricia has done it for love … and the outcome is a little different. It was clever and satisfying rather than sad and mad. Embedded within this thriller plot is a meditation on art, family, love, delusion, politics, identity. Patricia eventually realises she has invented Mickey for her own purposes, as he has done her - and love cannot flourish in such conditions. By the end of the story Patricia is transformed - not in the way she hoped but transformed nonetheless. All the solitary hours spent looking into the Vermeer bring alive in her what she sees in it - it is the Vermeer that guides her through these changes, and in a lovely metaphor, she takes it out from under it’s glass where it is “embalmed”, so she can see it properly. When she comes to see herself properly, she has this to say: ''I am grateful for her lesson, for what she has taught me about integrity, and constancy. Through her, I have come to know myself, and I have begun to understand the world a little better, too.’'Lovely, really.
(pasted) New York art historian Patricia Dolan is so swept away by the distant Irish cousin, Michael O'Driscoll, who seeks her out for her expertise but quickly becomes her lover, that in no time she is living in a remote cottage on the west coast of Ireland and is part of an IRA-inspired plot to kidnap a Vermeer painting (titled The Music Lesson) from the British royal collection and hold it for ransom. Patricia, alone in a wet winter with no company but the cherished Vermeer, keeps a journal that is the basis of the novel. The situation is eventually resolved with brutal suddenness. Weber remains a writer to be cherished, with the added, and quite rare, virtue of never writing a word too much.Great book, right to the point but not dry and a twisted ending. Looking forward to reading her other 5 books. She packs alot in 178 pages.
What do You think about The Music Lesson (2011)?
The book begins with a woman babysitting a stolen Vermeer in a cottage in a remote village in the west of Ireland. The first half of the book is a series of flashbacks explaining how she got there; the rest of the book tells us how it all turns out. A good story, expertly told. I considered a fourth star, but have an aversion to the stereotype of roguishly charming IRA operatives, able to bend schoolmarmish undersexed protagonists to their will merely by turning up the blarney quotient and exposing the right amount of freckled clavicle.
—David
Patricial Dolan is a woman in living in pain - her marriage is over after her daughter is killed in a car accident and she no longer knows how to connect with people to move on in the aftermath. Until a hot young Irish rebel comes into her life bringing love, sex and a scheme to steel a priceless Vermeer. Sounds like a book I wouldn't want to read. And yet - this book is so much more than its trite movie of the week plot. In fact, I found the plot secondary to the inner thoughts of Patricia, the descriptions of the Vermeer, and life in the beautifully desolate Irish village created by Weber. The IRA storyline is almost a distraction although it is certainly a vehicle to bring Patricia to fictional Ballyroe. She should have known the sex was too good to be true. Fortunately for us, she spends most of the book alone in a cabin in Ireland in January with just her thoughts and a notebook. 3.5 stars for prompting me to google paintings by Vermeer, the potato famine, and the rule of William of Orange.
—Jennifer
This book is short at only 178 pages but it is packed, just filled with intrigue. Weber does a fantastic job with the subtleties and the twisting the drama. A museum librarian is seduced (willingly) to steal a famous painting from the Queen as a statement and ransom from the IRA. She hides out in a remote village in Ireland with the painting during the fallout. Really enjoyed this. Especially the little tidbit about Ireland and England relationship with the Dutch (since the painting was a Vermeer).
—Tara
