Laura Cumming’s latest book was a surprise hit last year, making two prize shortlists and numerous best-of-year recommendations. Now that it arrives in paperback, does it live up to expectations?
A word of context first. Cumming is the art critic for the UK’s Observer newspaper, and an excellent one at that. Her last book, The Vanishing Man, had me helplessly gripped within a handful of pages on a subject I had no idea I was interested in: the life and work of the painter Velázquez.
The two books have more in common than a first glance might suggest. Primarily, both are detective stories: The Vanishing Man was in pursuit of a Velázquez painting that hadn’t been seen in more than a century; On Chapel Sands seeks an answer to a mystery that has plagued Cumming’s family for almost as long. Why was her mother, Betty, abducted from a beach in the autumn of 1929 at the age of three, only to be reunited with her parents a few days later?
At first this seems like a sort of locked-room mystery: nobody saw her go, and Betty had of course no memory of the day herself so did not know what happened. As the story unfurls, we find that there are many more things Betty did not know which we usually take for granted: she had no memory of the early years of her life, she did not know she was born Grace, and she did not see her own birth certificate until the age of 40.
The key that unlocks these mysteries is that she was adopted, by George and Veda Elston, and taken from her birth home to live in Chapel St Leonards, a coastal village in Lincolnshire. But if your quick assumption on the book’s central mystery is that Betty was snatched from the beach by her birth parents, then think again; it’s a lot knottier than that.
Pitiless detail
Cumming sets out to uncover the hidden hollows of her mother’s past, more CSI: Skegness than Who Do You Think You Are?. She is forensic and pitiless in her attention to detail, and the core of her investigation is the photographs of her mother’s childhood that were left behind.
As an art critic, Cumming can read an image persuasively, and the book works as a primer on how pictures and paintings inform our existence. She teases out tiny details from old photos about the season and the setting, and uses them to drill deeper into her mother’s childhood. Often an answer hatches a further question – why is there a photograph of Betty and her adopted father George on Chapel Sands at least a year before she was adopted? – but these are the tiny bites through which truth is reached.
“The photograph implies the photographer” is one of Cumming’s refrains, and usually the photographer of Betty’s childhood photos is George, a man she called her father but came to dislike so much that as an adult she changed her name again, to Elizabeth, to dilute her old name’s association with him. George, described by someone who knew him as “domineering and somewhat like a character in Dickens”, is the real key to the puzzle.
Corkscrews and hairpins
Of course, Cumming’s mother is a living part of the investigation, now in her 90s but ready to share her memories of older childhood. Yet what comes most powerfully from these is how the anchoring of Betty’s life came late, not from her debated upbringing but from her own experience as a parent: “I never belonged to anyone,” she tells Cumming, “until I belonged to you.”
There are too many corkscrews and hairpins in Betty’s story to reveal them here, but the depth and range of the concealments and subterfuges leave the reader’s jaw on the floor and verify Alan Bennett’s observation: “All families have a secret: they’re not like other families.” And yet, as Cumming notes, “every act is human here; nothing is beyond imagination or understanding”.
One of the principal ways we understand human acts is through art, and one of the great pleasures of On Chapel Sands is the digressions – which are not really digressions – where Cumming writes with fluency and verve on great artworks, from Degas’s painting of the Bellelli family (“a psychological masterpiece, a novel in paint”) to Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting which, more than any other, “has made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high, round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas”.
Cumming is alive to art, because one of the things we learn from the book is that both her parents were artists. Cumming became an art critic rather than an artist but, as her writing proves, this gives us something equally worth celebrating: the interpretation of great creativity to make it accessible to a wider audience. But I suppose a book reviewer would say that.
