In a world at war, an artist struggles with memory, desire
The Last Summer of the World
By Emily Mitchell
Norton, 390 pp., $24.95
Imposture
By Benjamin Markovits
Norton, 288 pp., paperback, $13.95
The Nature of Monsters
By Clare Clark
Harcourt, 382 pp., $25
It struck me the other day that when John Keats said "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" and Mark Twain said "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds," both writers were putting art in its place or, rather, in very different places: on a pedestal to be worshipped and in the pillory for target practice.
In "The Last Summer of the World," Emily Mitchell's absorbing first novel, art finds itself in the firing line during the First World War when Edward Steichen, the renowned American painter and photographer, returns to France, where he once studied, made his name, and lived with his wife and two daughters. He is back to take a new kind of picture, reconnaissance shots of the trenches and front lines from the air; photographs that are "not made to be beautiful, but to be clear." Captain St eichen learns to read a deformed landscape from the sky. "The puckered skin around a scar -- in photographs, that is what trenches at the front resembled. [They] bit back and forth into the ground, incisions trembling maniacally across the fields, the wire between the lines, two parallel tracks, strands of blindness. Around them the earth had been blasted into a chaotic new topography. . . . There was an abruptness to this map that the guns had drawn; a frenzy. Hypnotized and repelled, he felt he was seeing something that human beings were never supposed to know about themselves."
Soldiers, of course, live and die in the trenches, in the air, behind the cameras, and Mitchell engages our sympathy for them and for the ravaged land by emphasizing the fragility of both. A corporal's shy attempt at a joke; sunlight on a blasted tree. Her writing is spare yet never mannered; she holds back only to draw you in, whether she is describing a spectacular aerial dogfight or a marital spat. The novel has plenty of both, and Mitchell braids the wartime present together with scenes from St eichen's romantic past and from a marriage insufficient to the male artist's needs. "She must understand that you need freedom more than anything else," St eichen's friend Auguste Rodin says of Clara St eichen. "Otherwise, your work will suffer." St eichen has just stumbled on Rodin exercising his freedom with the naked Isadora Duncan and will soon follow his mentor's example, but it is love, not sex, that finally downs the St eichen union, and Mitchell portrays that struggle as memorably as she does any battle.
While St eichen and Mitchell's novel are the real thing, Benjamin Markovits's "Imposture" is a proud fake about deluded phonies. Markovits introduces it as a manuscript bequeathed to him by a teacher who claimed to be named Pattieson when he was in fact Sullivan. "Imposture," set in 1819, revolves around John Polidori, erstwhile physician to Lord Byron who is mistaken for Byron by a woman who pretends to be her sister, the sister who danced with the poet at the duchess of Devonshire's ball. Add the fact that within the novel, "The Vampyre" is published and attributed to Lord Byron when it was in fact written by Polidori, and you have the makings of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. All that is missing is a hidden birthmark. And a sense of humo r. Markovits, a writer of great style, alas, takes himself seriously enough to deliver lines like this: "A three-quarter moon lay awkwardly on its back in the sky, but its brightness suggested the abrupt certainty of a struck gong." On the other hand, he can write of a childhood home, "What a large cold house it was to be so small in." Markovits can also lure us into Byron's seductive world, as Polidori is lured until the failed physician sees, too late, that " he was the vampyre. . . . For years he had fed off the blood of everyone around him: Frances, Lord Byron, and now her."
Ah yes, her, the essential tragic heroine. "Imposture" has a fine one in Eliza Esmond , who "had a look of innocence abused, and worse still, too long preserved: consequently soured. Rather sensual, in its way, like all frustration." Thankfully, the heroine of Clare Clark's novel "The Nature of Monsters " is spared such Jamesian flourishes, although not much else. Voluptuous 16-year-old Eliza Tally is bait, dangled by her mother to entrap a vile nobleman. When that scheme fails, a pregnant Eliza is packed off to London in 1718, where a gleaming St. Paul's seems to "gain its strength from the squalor around it, each day sending its roots deeper into the tainted London soil, while, above it, like a great lung, the dome filled magnificently with each and every foul-smelling exhalation." Clark, whose previous novel, "The Great Stink," wonderfully described the construction of London's sewers, here explores the fetid world of a deranged apothecary -- Eliza's new employer -- whose opium-induced vision is to breed a baby monster. Eliza, however, is no swooning maiden, and even when events move from lurid to ludicrous, you have to cheer her on.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 
