A Son of the Rock

47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)