REVIEW: The Muse by Jessie Burton…A Literary Exploration of Identity, Privacy and Creativity

“Most people are other people,” a weary Oscar Wilde pointed out. He’d intended to deride people making stabs at originality by echoing each other.

Writers would agree with his observation for a very different reason. Writers and artists inhabit many personas, infusing each with their own essences, wondering how much of their personal truths have become the truths of the stories they craft, and how these creations, once set loose into the world, reflect on them.

The Muse, Jessie Burton’s second novel, is expertly woven around questions every maker can relate to. This fictional rendering of the tussle between identity and creativity, privacy and self-worth, is neatly done. As in her first novel The Miniaturist, historical landscapes are summoned in an instant; the powerful cadence of Burton’s prose anchoring the reader within the borders of the place and era, drawing before the mind’s eye July in a Spanish villa with the same fluency and ease as a wedding party in a London flat.

The Muse draws the story arcs of two women who, though a generation apart, seemingly enjoy an apposite symmetry. The two are joined by a mysterious fulcrum — a stunning art piece based on the legend of two women and their own spars with the limits put on their creativity.

Olive, a painter, timidly toys with the idea of art school; her father, an experienced art collector, believes no woman can achieve true art. Odette is an immigrant to London from Trinidad, aspiring to be a writer; but scared to own her abilities. Both women are social oddities. Both women have a creative itch, and both feel trepidations about the work they make. Both encounter love, and fulfill their creative impulses as romance ignites them.

Perhaps at first glance it doesn’t seem as though the two women are similar in terms of disenfranchisement. Odette is Afro-Caribbean, and faces all the colonialist assumptions the sixties hauls at her. Olive is privileged and will never want for money, but, along with the misogyny of the nineteen thirties, she has other oppressions to contend with. When the book illustrates her mother’s anodyne existence as a wealthy white woman locked away in a Spanish villa, it hints at Olive’s own shackles.

Burton stops the two characters short of mutability through differences defining each woman in relation to their gifts and to themselves. Both Olive’s and Odette’s first forays into having their works celebrated in the larger public are unwittingly under a man’s name. Their divergent responses reverberate, deciding the outcome of their lives.

The book teases us with a character’s frustrating reluctance to be known for her work. The motivations make sense, and yet feel incongruent with what we imagine as the maker’s cravings for ownership. Yes, invisibility grants permission, shields one’s privacy. Would an artist go so far as to be content with permanent lack of recognition in order to be concerned solely in the making of art? To be a creator is to build a house for other people to live in, using nuggets of personally crafted insights and observations as masonry. The mind is exposed. As an uncertain Odette says, the writer’s worth is on display. From that perspective, a safe space in secret is a luxury.

The book is also quick to point out the perils of anonymity, and gently disarms us of the overly romanticised notions of the beginner artist. In the same conversation with Odette, it is pointed out that a reader must be able to fit Odette’s short stories into something different from what she has intended them for. Her writing is not a measure of her worth. Art must breathe independent of its creator. A created work must be viable — a fetus that can live in its context beyond the womb, and growing to fit newer contexts.

Through the conversations in this book we see something that is a rarity in media — women helping and mentoring other women. Burton examines relationships between women with a refreshing candour not normally used to look at female friendships. The interactions between the women in this book are no less intensely portrayed than the characters’ first steps towards romantic love. This level of respect is no small feat.

The catalyst for a creative to burst out of their shell must be disruptive and provocative. There’s a scene where the characters practice shooting and one of them “spoils the game,” her aim being so accurate it causes conflict. This scene is a significant window into the character, and into the combustion accompanying the unveiling of talent.

The book also forces us to ask questions about the nature of facts when it comes to art. As admirers of art, and being respectful of truth, how far should one trust the artist’s own version of events? Is the narrative formed in relation to the world’s estimation of the creator’s gift? Can an artist deliberately misrepresent herself and her objectives?

Art is a balance between an artist coming close enough to the work she can breathe life into it, but also stepping aside to let the work tell its own story. Burton’s voice is there among her characters, but she does an incredible job of letting the story play out in the characters’ own voices. These are her reflections and conclusions, yet she leaves most thoughts open to be further pondered on and interpreted. We see the insufficiency of the single story in Odette’s reflection on how people in England expect her to represent Trinidad in all its complexity. “The Muse” doesn’t pretend to answer all the questions it explores.

The artist’s perception of what — and who — is a muse might well be faulty. Chasing after the muse obsessively can detract from the creative process. Art requires an esoteric Sufi like thinking — burning away the mediator, becoming at one with the true Beloved, while maintaining a worshipful separation from the One out of humility. Is outside inspiration so crucial to sustain creativity? Can inspiration be best wooed in hiding? Is it the work of art to be seen in conjunction with the artist? The questions this book asks will resonate with every creator of art — and each one of us will have our own answer.

The Muse

(NOVEL)

By Jessie Burton

Picador, UK

ISBN 978–1–4472–5097–5

445 pp.