Honor Clerk

In one of his more endearing flights of fancy, Eddie Izzard once speculated on what the Greeks did with themselves in the Wooden Horse while waiting for nightfall in Troy. It was clearly something that Homer had never got round to thinking through properly, but for Izzard, once a chap has got into his breastplate, helmet, greaves and short pleated skirt the answer is obvious — housework, and not just housework but hoovering the inside of his temporary home before he gets down to the real business of the warrior hero.

It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way to avoid. In the right sort of hands, of course, it can be brilliantly effective, but imagine a Jane Austen novel narrated by Miss Bates or Jane Eyre told by Mrs Fairfax and one can see some of the problems that Margaret Forster sets herself when she refracts her story of tragedy and obsessive grief through the person of Louise Roscoe. Louise teaches in a primary school. She is married to Don, an advertising executive. Over is her diary, written to try to help her deal with the death in a sailing accident of her teenage daughter, Miranda.

‘Yes, you may well sigh and beat your head on the table,’ the narrator-protagonist of Love Songs and Lies addresses the reader on page 115, but if you’re going to allow Libby Purves’s heroine to get to you this early in the book you’ll be in a bad way by the end. There is a long and melancholy tradition of self-sacrificial heroines to which she all too knowingly belongs, but when it comes to an irritating combination of self-abnegation and sheer wrong-headedness there is not a Fanny Price or Agnes Copperfield in the whole of fiction who could hold a candle to Libby Purves’s Sally Bellinger.

Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy - or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness? Is grief an illness? Is art whatever we say it is, or are there limits? Can murder be art? These and many other questions hover around Siri Hustvedt's third novel, a compassionate and gripping drama. The novel tells the story of Leo Hertzberg, an art historian at Columbia University whose life is changed when he buys a painting by Bill Wechsler and is drawn into the contemporary New York art scene.