Tiepolo Blue: 'The best novel I have read for ages' Stephen Fry

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I began to think about what it might be like for someone locked inside that kind of identity to break out of their old life into something bracing and different. Hollinghurst has been mentioned in several reviews I’ve read of Tiepolo Blue, and to be honest I’ve not read enough Hollinghurst to comment on this (in fact, I think, only The Line of Beauty so far, I need to change this! The sex scenes were good and quite unforgettable, but all the twists and turns and the ending really didn’t work for me, I’m afraid. While the family into which Giambattista was born was thoroughly bourgeois, it bore no aristocratic lineage. I’d guessed what was happening about halfway through this clever, neatly constructed tragicomedy but it still had me gripped, wondering when the penny would drop for Don.

Their quiet and considered dialogue gives Cahill the opportunity to show us Don trying to make some sense of his expanding emotional and intellectual horizons. In addition to his work in Italy, he produced spectacular masterpieces across Europe and especially in royal palaces in Bavaria and Spain. Overall, it all seemed too overwrought, there were too many trendy elements, and the two main characters appeared too close to caricatures. The focus of Tiepolo Blue and the best part of it is the character of Don Lamb, a 43-year-old art historian at Peterhouse, Cambridge in the mid-1990s, who has a brilliant academic brain and a boarded-up heart; he’s obviously gay, but has long since locked himself up in a chastity belt and thrown away the key.When Tiepolo died suddenly in 1770, Mengs prevailed on the powers-that-be at San Pascual and Aranjuez not to use Tiepolo's seven altarpieces but to install his and those of his Spanish apprentices instead.

Framed as they are by two trompe l'oeil columns, Anthony and Cleopatra look as if they might be on an opera set: the glass and pearl are props; the figures mere actors. Val offers a way out: the directorship of a Dulwich gallery plus the use of his own house full of beautiful pieces. Beneath the former, sit two women one with serpents in her hand and hair and the other clutches some golden coins. He has written for publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement.A year or so later we find him painting two spectacular frescoes - The Triumph of Aurora and the Myth of Phaethon - for the Venetian publisher Giambattista Baglioni. The last debut novel I read that had this much talent buzzing around inside it was Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library.

This is an absolute masterpiece of a book that I'm not entirely sure I have the words to recommend enough. The Evening Standard wrote: ‘This divine debut from art critic and academic James Cahill is the smart, sexy read you need in 2022… Not only an addictive page-turner, Cahill’s book taps into the tensions and suspicions between generations that feels incredibly relevant for our testy times. He tries not to look at it, but his rooms face out onto the Court; even through closed curtains he can see its lights mocking him. I mean, at least I could’ve tried to believe that the guy was an unreliable narrator who wanted us to think that, for some reason, and despite being in his early forties, he didn’t have any sexual experience whatsoever. His departure from academia was not entirely by choice but at the times when it seems that someone is pulling the strings that guide him through his new life, there is doubt caused by some event or other.

James Cahill’s debut novel TIEPOLO BLUE was published by Sceptre in summer 2022 and has been shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. He earned a degree in Classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a master's degree in Contemporary Art from the Courtauld Institute.