To write fiction about art is notoriously hard. Inventing bad art is easy, an excellent parlour game, but to imagine a successful artist you have to create a body of work that justifies their success, and that’s a different matter. In Hagstone, Irish critic and essayist Sinéad Gleeson’s first novel, this is done deftly and convincingly. The book centres on Nell, an artist living and working on an island a half day’s journey from the Irish mainland. Her work includes sand sculptures and sound pieces; underwater statues; a hypothetical project involving a lighthouse – all of which, as Gleeson explains in an afterword, were inspired by the work of real artists. This plausibility is vital because it underpins Nell’s character: we have to believe in her work to believe in her, and in her choice to put this work at the centre of her life. The result of Gleeson’s care is a novel about art which, wonderfully, doesn’t romanticise it. Nell’s work appears both vital and mundane; occasionally transcendent; often exhausting.
Gleeson is excellent, too, on the realities of this life. There is its gruelling physicality – “Looping wires around the trees, hoping branches would take the weight of the speakers. The possibility of electrocution” – and the endless quest for cash. “It all circles back to money in the end,” Gleeson writes. Some ideas are never converted to reality. “Grimly filling out forms, hawking the work in funding drives.” Nell supplements her income by cleaning, and by giving guided tours. She’s regarded by the island’s male population as “not wife material … Thank fuck for that”, but despite her insistence that she’s who she wants to be, her isolation is uneasy. It’s the price of being an artist, perhaps – but should it be? To question the personal cost of making art is not, Gleeson suggests, the same as questioning its value.
