The Fraud
By Barbara Ewing
Little, Brown, $38.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

Sometimes you only need to read a few dud or patchy examples of a certain genre to find yourself going off it. So it was with me and historical fiction. So thank goodness for London-based New Zealander Barbara Ewing whose latest historical novel, The Fraud, is an addictively good read.
It opens in Bristol in 1735 with the shabby genteel Marshall family struggling to keep up appearances in the face of gambling debts and beckoning ruin. Then the plague carries off most of them and so the titular fraud begins.
Eldest son Philip manages to get a boat passage to Italy. Years later he returns, posing as a flamboyant Italian artist Filipo De Vecellio and begins to build a reputation as a fashionable portrait painter. He retrieves his little sister Grace from the hellhole where she’s been working as a hat maker, and installs her as his housekeeper but when it becomes clear that she is the more talented artist of the pair, a jealous Philip forbids her to paint. And so Grace bides her time doing the things that were acceptable for women back then, shopping for food, presiding over dinner parties, until her overwhelming urge to be an artist forces her into a secret life and ultimately she attempts to pull off the greatest fraud of all.
There is plenty of melodrama here and at times the reader must be willing to stretch their credulity. The shifts to and from Grace’s voice can be sudden and a little clumsy. But Ewing’s great strength as a historical storyteller is in knowing just how much period detail put in and what to leave out. She brings alive the art world of the time, with real painters like Hogarth and Gainsborough making cameo appearances, without slowing the steady canter of the narrative.
Ewing is particularly good when painting in the background of eighteenth century London with all its colour and filth and also when portraying the plight of women of the time, financially dependent on men, their own dreams best forgotten.
The art world provides her with plenty of rich material, the character of Grace is compelling and there is some fascinating stuff about the ruinous effects of eighteenth century beauty products but what really makes this book worth reading is Ewing’s skill at unfolding a story. Like her last novel, The Mesmerist this is a real page-turner and enough to restore anyone’s faith in historical fiction.

Booklover
Kate De Goldi is the author of The 10pm Question winner of the 2009 New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award

The book I love most is.... There's a bunch of I've loved for many years, books I come back to for pleasure, comfort, instruction, surprise. Books change - because a reader changes...so, for example, a book I like enormously, Sydney Bridge Upside Down by David Ballantyne, which I've just been re-reading for the first time in five years, seems much sadder and harsher this time round. On the other hand, Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst, one of my favourite picture book stories (which I recently read to a class of nine year olds), seems both funnier and more profound - and a brilliantly succinct character study.
The book I'm reading right now is.. Under The Autumn Garden by Jan Mark... Jan Mark was a great English writer for young people. Her writing was adventurous, and demanding of the reader. This is her second novel and very characteristic of her work: in some of her best books very little happens - in terms of pure action - but the stories have a strong sense of place and relationships. She writes masterly dialogue and is often pungently witty. In this story a boy digs a hole at the bottom of the garden for a history project. His family is having some work done on their house.
The builder's son both helps and annoys the boy. The hole is disappointing...and then it isn't. That's it, pretty much. But the writing, the characterisation, the rendering of the place and its history, the back and forth between the family members...that's all terrific.
The book I'd like to read next is... While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison. It's an 'inquiry' into a horrible family murder case in the USA; but it's just as much about Kathryn Harrison, who's a strange, egocentric, damaged, but rather compelling writer. It'll be an interesting book to read just as the Bain murder trial has ended.

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino is the books editor at the Herald on Sunday where this review, and her Booklover column featuring Kate de Goldi, were first published (14 June, 2009). She is also a much admired NZ-based novelist whose latest title, The Italian Wedding, (Orion), was recently published in NZ, Australia and the UK .