The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, by Ellery Lloyd - Kate
Writing a good mystery is a tricky exercise. It relies on both the maintenance of suspense, and the delivery of a plausible revelation of a resolution. The reader wants to be both surprised and unsurprised. To accomplish this, the clues to the unravelling of any mystery have to be present all along. The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby delivers both a page- turning story of suspense and a breadcrumb of clues that leaves the reader satisfied with the ultimate answer to the puzzle.
The author, or rather authors, as Ellery Lloyd is a pseudonym for the writing team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, weaves together several storylines across perspectives and time, the 1930s, the 1990s and the present day. The three main protagonists’ lives, Caroline Cooper, Patrick Lambert and Juliette Willoughby, intersect both directly and indirectly in interlocking ways – through academic study, family connections and the world of art. While the story swirls around an aristocratic family – the Willoughby’s – and Cambridge University, the characters are mostly outsiders in these rarified environments. Cooper is a gifted student with a humble, tragic past, Lambert is the son of a largely unsuccessful art dealer who trades on his old school connections with the Willoughby family, and Juliette Willoughby is an artist estranged from her seemingly conventional family. The central action involves the rediscovery of a surrealist painting by Willoughby, Self-Portrait as Sphynx, long thought lost in a blaze that killed Juliette and her lover in Paris in 1938
While this is a straight-forward mystery, there are other deeper issues explored in the text. Lloyd has, I think cleverly, inserted an art history lesson that speaks to both the surrealist movement and women’s marginalisation in the history of the movement. When Caroline Cooper starts researching Juliette’s artistic output for her undergraduate dissertation at Cambridge in the 1990s, Juliette is remembered as the muse of a great surrealist artist with no know artwork of her own in existence. Juliette’s flight from her oppressive family to Paris with the much older German Surrealist Oskar Erlich is initially exciting. However, Erlich’s tangled romantic history and his own jealousies make the flight to Paris a journey into a different sort of oppression as he becomes angered and uncomfortable with Juliette’s artistic ambitions. When the initial excitement wanes, the power imbalances in Willoughby’s and Erlich’s relationship emerge and the novel addresses these imbalances.
This reflects the all-too-real experiences of female artists and how they are remembered. Lloyd’s novel speaks to the example of surrealist photographer Dora Maar. For many years, Maar’s lasting legacy was her relationship with the much older Pablo Picasso. Her art was ignored and she was described as a rejected muse – known as Picasso’s ‘weeping woman’ who was the subject of many of his paintings (Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light | Pablo Picasso | The Guardian). In the novel, Cooper researches and celebrates Willoughby as the artist, rather than the muse.
A minor criticism of the book is that a short introduction to surrealism and Paris in the 1930s would have helped the readers understand these nuances. It would have also helped to have a Willoughby family tree to help sort out the family relationships. These are minor quibbles in what was a fast-paced and compelling read.
