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The Original is an art-filled, artfully deceptive work. It’s one which warns us to be on our guard. “My memories were not to be trusted,” the narrator confides after delivering a first brisk nudge to the reader’s elbow: “Do you believe this story?” A paragraph later: “What about now?”
The answer to that opening prod is: no, we don’t. Our answer becomes increasingly hesitant, however, as Nell Stevens reels us ever deeper into her shimmeringly intelligent exploration of the nature of authenticity, both in art and love.
Nine years old when she arrives, unwelcome, at her uncle’s decrepit Oxfordshire estate, Grace Inderwick is 25 and a skilled counterfeiter of masterpieces by the time her widowed, never-named aunt whisks her off to Rome in autumn 1899. The main reason for their trip is to meet a young man claiming to be the aunt’s long-lost son, and decide whether he is the real thing. In a parallel storyline, Grace meets a dealer to sell her copies to credulous buyers and seek the financial independence an orphan craves.
Both women, for different reasons, want this self-authenticated Charles Inderwick to convince them. The unlovable and increasingly unbalanced aunt — in what feels like a nod to du Maurier’s Rebecca, Stevens shows her madly hosting a fancy-dress party garbed as Lady Macbeth — seeks a worthy heir, not backstairs Grace. Meanwhile Grace longs to regain the good-natured, troubled boy who had taught her to paint, who was “relentlessly kind”, and whose reported death at sea she mourned “with the fervour of a pilgrim for a favourite saint”.
Grace expresses doubts from the moment she sees the claimant, theatrically laid out on a couch as if, she ponders, for a tableau vivant. A leather-bound book fails to conceal an “enormous face” that Grace doesn’t recall. She studies him with the fierce intensity that Stevens also shows her applying to the works of van Eyck, Velázquez and Courbet, and here something feels wrong: “Was it too much, too insistent, that the diary across his face was embossed with my cousin’s initials: C.R.I. for Charles Robert Inderwick? And there it was, too, on his cufflink, C.R.I., and there, too, C.R.I., stitched across the breast pocket of his threadbare brown jacket. But then, hadn’t Charles always loved his initials . . . loved to mark himself in that way?”
Charles passes. For now. Welcomed to Inderwick by the woman he hailed as “mother” (not his previous “mater”), an ill-at-ease Charles begins to offer an unconscious mirror to his cousin’s secret life. Not as a forger — an art on which Stevens writes with consummate attentiveness — but as somebody forced by his times to hide his sexuality. In a flashback scene — the narrative crosses decades and continents — Charles, who had left home for good reason, is attacked by his loutish father as a “sod”. Grace, while ready to marry her supposed cousin for convenience, finds greater ease in bed with Ruby, an artist’s daughter who sparks a brief affair and a lasting obsession.
The historical setting of The Original is familiar territory to Stevens. Her first novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life (2022), imagined the child of a ghost falling in love with George Sand during the writer’s 1838 trip to Mallorca with Chopin. Previously Stevens had published two fictionalised literary memoirs, Bleaker House (2017) and Mrs Gaskell & Me (2018), that play with plausibility, possibility and a blurring of genres.
This slipperiness recurs throughout The Original, with its accomplished mix of suspense and reversals. Immaculate in structure, sure-footed in tone and propelled forward by a rising tide of apprehension, the novel is a captivatingly strange masterpiece of Victorian pastiche. It puts Stevens in the class of Sarah Waters and even du Maurier herself as a sharp-witted fiction writer whose masterly technique and style are matched and sustained by a compelling gift for spinning a yarn.
The Original by Nell Stevens Scribner £16.99, 400 pages
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