On Chapel Sands/Laura Cumming
Laura Cummimg’s non-fiction book is the story of the abduction of a three year old girl from the beach at Chapel Sands, Lincolnshire.
To say more would be a spoiler as Laura Cumming is the narrator and at the beginning of the book the relationship between her and the abducted girl is unclear.
Cumming, who is the art critic of The Observer, writes well and there are fine descriptive passages of Lincolnshire.
However as an art expert she cannot resist art comparison.
Two two well-known art works Landscape and the Fall of Icarus (Peter Breughel the Elder) and The Berlini Family by Edgar Degas are expansively discussed as their subject matter is relevant to the story but perhaps not so relevant for the amount of pages involved.
A satisfying book goes beyond its content.
One of the themes of this work is adoption.
It prompted me to think why and how young children are given away by-their parents, how they are treated, the curiosity of the child to know and possibly re-acquaint himself/herself with the biological parents.
All is revealed at the end and despite earlier longuers and opacity it’s worth waiting for.
Alice Mansfield writes:
“I know of Laura Cumming and have partially read her book on Velazquez. She knows her stuff but has tendency to overwrite. Art appreciation is necessarily visual not textual. On a Kindle the illustrations are the size of postage stamps which only adds to the problem.”
