shelfofunread 's review for:

The Flames by Sophie Haydock

4.5

emotional informative inspiring medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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Offering a well-researched blend of fact and fiction, Sophie Haydock’s debut novel The Flames instantly transported me to early twentieth-century Vienna and into the lives of four extraordinary women, all of whom have influenced the life – and work – of scandalous, innovative artist Egon Schiele.

Flame-haired and fiery-tempered, Adele Harms knows that she is destined to be more than just another society wife. From the moment she sees the young artist who has moved in across the street, she knows that their fates will be intertwined. Gertrude Schiele, meanwhile, longs to follow in her brother’s footsteps and escape the confines of their small town existence. For Vally Neuzil, already a model for the famous Gustav Klimt, Egon is just another artist who wants to paint her: a means to an end that becomes something more. For Edith Harms, Adele’s sister, he is the man who will become her husband.

All four of these women are connected by Egon Schiele: inveterate artist and Klimt protégé, whose defiant, provocative nudes scandalise polite society and earn him a reputation as a pornographer. Yet, as Sophie Haydock displays, these women might be connected to Schiele but their lives are not – and should not – be solely defined by him.

In this captivating novel, Haydock imagines the lives of four women who, although their faces shine out at us from the walls of art galleries and collections across the globe, have had their voices lost amidst the admiring chatter of the art world. In doing so, she explores not only the relationship between artist and model, but explores the inner lives and personal circumstances of four women whose provocative poses set the artist, the art world, and polite society, aflame.

With an evocative sense of both time and place, Haydock expertly re-creates the heady and sensual world of Egon Schiele, capturing both the allure that he might have offered whilst being unafraid to consider the problematic ways in which the women who made his name might have been treated. I say ‘might’ because, as Sophie Haydock makes clear in an illuminating author’s note, very little tangible evidence – beyond, of course, Egon’s captivating portraits of them – has survived about the lives of Egon’s muses. What Haydock imagines, however, is not only convincing but offers a tantalising glimpse into the vivid, complicated lives that surely lay behind these images.

I became utterly absorbed in the lives of Adele, Gertrude, Vally, Edith, and the way in which their lives intersected, spiralling around the complex and often challenging figure of Egon himself. Rich in historical detail and thick with the allure of imagined possibilities, The Flames is an impressive debut that is vividly bought to life the lives of one of the twentieth-centuries most provocative artists, and the women who lay behind so many of his famous works.