Anthony Quinn’s oeuvre – eight novels, all of them more or less historical, most quietly brilliant – seems worthy of greater celebration. He’s a fine prose stylist, able to evoke the past with a vivid immediacy that must owe some debt to his former career as a film critic. At his best – in the glorious Curtain Call (soon to be a film starring Sir Ian McKellen) or Our Friends in Berlin – he is as good as Kate Atkinson or William Boyd, authors who seem useful points of comparison.
Molly & the Captain is a rollicking read. Sweeping across centuries in its three interlinked sections, it summons the past effortlessly, as the vehicle for a plot that is both intricate and immaculately constructed. It feels like a kind of consummation of his career to date, giving us a series of moving love stories, a gripping mystery and some unforgettable characters, all of them tied together by their relationship to two paintings: Molly and the Captain, a work by the fictional 18th-century artist William Merrymount (who appears to be based upon Gainsborough), and Portrait of a Young Man, by Merrymount’s daughter, Laura.
