“Even on that first, rushed morning, I could see that the paintings fell into two categories. The first were controlled, jewel-like realist images. Portraits and landscapes. Soldiers and nurses in uniform, people at work, on farms, in factories.
Then there were the second kind: the dreamscapes, sprawling images that looked much closer to the work of the Antipodeans, paintings that held stories and hints and allusions. In the dreamscapes space and time were warped, icons floated in dark skies, every brushstroke hinted at a history I could nearly sense. Black swans and white gulls flew across shifting space. Nurses or nuns floated on shadowed suburban streets while light spilled from open windows.”

The Biographer’s Lover is the second novel by Australian journalist and author, Ruby J. Murray. Little-known Geelong-born artist Edna Cranmer has died, and her daughter, Victoria wants to get her work known. The young biographer is told by her agent that it’s most probably a vanity publishing job: do a quick monograph and move on to something more worthwhile. When they meet, the family’s lawyer warns that all written correspondence is under embargo, but Victoria is confident that Edna’s scrapbooks and artworks are more than sufficient to tell the story.

But not everything is straightforward: when she goes to see the paintings, in Edna’s Sorrento studio, Max Cranmer is not at all convinced his wife would have wanted this. He refuses to help, as do his mother and his son, Geelong Cats star, Percy ‘Cranno’ Cranmer.

What Percy does suggest is that she abandon the monograph for a biography of him, something her agent has also suggested would be more lucrative. And when she sees the first painting, she’s inclined to agree: it’s sloppy, amateurish and lifeless. But Edna’s other works, by comparison, are so good that she feels there’s a biography to be written.

The biographer does her research, cataloguing Edna’s works, talking to her extended family, reading any correspondence that hasn’t been embargoed, checking press archives and making enquiries with the War Memorial and DVA, and becomes totally engrossed with finding out just who this unknown yet intriguing artist was.

But there are little niggles: she begins to wonder if Victoria has a different agenda, because she summarily dismisses as unimportant some of the facts that the biographer uncovers, while actively deflecting her from other lines of enquiry. The biographer, however, can’t let it go...

The story is told in two alternating strands: “Edna: A Life” is the published story of Edna Cranmer’s life, noting sources the biographer used; “The Biographer” details the experience of researching the biography and the biographer’s own deepening involvement with those surviving Edna. The eponymous lover does not appear until the final pages, but is well worth the wait.

There’s a mystery here that will keep the reader guessing until the closing pages. Murray expertly feeds in the clues to keep the reader enthralled, but even the most astute reader is unlikely to grasp every aspect of this beautiful and fascinating tale before its moving and satisfying conclusion.

Murray’s descriptive prose is exquisite “The evening sky turned black above the floodlit stage of the field. Colours are like that; always shifting in comparison to the violence of the shade they’re standing next to” and she touches on some thought-provoking themes including the art world’s patriarchy. Tim Maguire’s beautiful cover artwork encloses a marvellous read and it will be interesting to see what Murray does next.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Black Inc.