James Cahill’s hotly tipped debut about art, privilege and power takes us first to the rarefied environs of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. It’s 1994 and winds of change are blasting through the university. An installation entitled Sick Bed – very much modelled on Tracey Emin’s groundbreaking My Bed – has been erected on the quadrangle. Sick Bed is “an iron frame packed with coil springs … propped up at one end by a mound of empty liquor bottles, crushed beer cans and snarled up clothes. On the grass beneath is an industrial lamp that rotates with slow, robotic gyrations.”
This unprecedented intervention amid cloisters and sandstone is met with mixed reactions. Don Lamb, an art historian at Peterhouse who is writing a monograph about skies in the works of rococo master Tiepolo, is particularly irked. For him, Sick Bed is emblematic of all that is wrong with contemporary art: the modern dismissal of transcendental beauty in favour of garish spectacle. Cahill uses Don’s conservative response to introduce his protagonist’s underlying anxiety about his place in a shifting world and, more broadly, to highlight Don’s characteristic rigidity. Don is something of an ascetic aesthete: adoring of expressiveness on the canvas, but a bastion of prudence in real life. A bachelor and scholar in his early 40s who has been at Peterhouse since his undergraduate days, Lamb’s is “a life of sexual abdication”: erudition dominates, while his gayness is studiously repressed.
