Inspiring Older Readers
The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Sandwiched between the truly excellent, Fencing Master in 1988 and his most famous novel, The Club Dumas of 1993, The Flanders Panel is a much more hit and miss affair with a plot that loses its way about two-thirds of the way through. The strength of the book is that Perez-Reverte has an eye for a twisted plot and loves to lead you down the back alleyways towards seeming dead-ends. All his early mystery novels are page turners even when they are, like this one, uneven in their performance.
The plot of this murder intrigue revolves around a mysterious inscription discovered during restoration work being done on a 15th century masterpiece – the Flanders Panel of the title. The restorer is a young, beautiful and talented restorer, Julia, who is intrigued to find that the inscription that apparently reveals a 15th century murder has been painted and deliberately covered over by the artist. What can lie behind such an unusual act? Will this valuable painting suddenly become astronomically valuable because of this discovery? And who stands to benefit?
But this isn’t just a historical murder mystery and it’s not just a story of art conservation. The painting tells its story through its subject matter – a partly finished game of chess. When a further series of murders start to happen involving the people around Julia, it becomes clear that the chess game is still being played by someone who seems intent on establishing a reign of terror in the young woman’s life.
There are plenty of red herrings and sneaky clues that Perez-Reverte loads into the story as it unfolds and he also introduces a cast of characters that are both vivid and, unfortunately, too close to stereotypes a little too often. The impossibly glamorous heroine, the shabby incompetent cop, the oily but smoothly handsome art-dealer, the trashy best friend, the primly sophisticated gay best friend, the other-worldly chess specialist…You get the idea.
None of this is too much of a problem and you won’t be reading a detective novel unless you’re prepared to accept some of these obvious tropes and for two thirds of the book I was happy enough to go along with this. But I can’t help but feel that the author wrote himself into something of a corner and the way out he takes is one of the least credible and least well explained I’ve read for a while.
In the end for a good detective murder mystery to have really been successful it probably isn’t characterisation that’s going to make it work for you but plot. You have to be able to feel that the author’s trickery was all constructed to lead you to an unexpected but rationally acceptable end. The murder and the murderer has to be explainable in some kind of real world situation even if the sane have to turn out to be insane, the trustworthy untrustworthy or the benign malicious. All of those are ok but you have to believe it. Where The Flanders Panel goes seriously off the rails is that murderer and motive just don’t hold up to even the flimsiest scrutiny.
As a result I put this book down feeling a bit cheated. I’d done my bit by going along with the suspension of disbelief around his cast of cartoonish characters only to discover he’s cheated me of an ending I can believe in.
Perez-Reverte is a better writer than this book suggests. If you want to explore his work I would highly recommend The Fencing Master as a place to start and maybe find your way to this if you find yourself in a forgiving frame of mind.
Terry Potter
June 2020