Sophie Haydock: The Flames, 9780857527639, Transworld (Penguin Random House UK) pub date: March 22, 2022

 

My first read of the year, journalist Sophie Haydock’s debut novel “The Flames” was a true hit. Thank you Transworld for the early galley. 

“The Flames” is based on four women in Egon Schiele’s life; he was one of the most controversial Austrian painters  in early 20^th century Vienna, a close friend of Gustav Klimt and known for his unusually explicit erotic paintings and sketches.  I saw them at the Albertina in Vienna and even today they are provoking. 

Schiele painted them all:  his headstrong sister Gertrude, his very first model with whom he shared an unusually close bond.  Vally: his muse, lover and model during his early year as an artists, an exceptionally free spirited, proud woman who stood by him when he was thrown into prison for his pornographic paintings and then the bourgeois, wealthy Harms sisters who both had a crush on him: Adele the older, more eccentric, possessive troublemaker of the two and Edith, the gentler, more conventional of the sisters who eventually became Egon’s wife.  

Haydock does an excellent job in painting the hard, often turbulent lives of each of them, overshadowed by WWI, taking fictional liberties with her narration but staying close to what actually happened.  She adds their biographies as an appendix and shares with the reader  what spurred her to write this excellent  novel  which I found so captivating. Egon Schiele, around whose life all four rotate, ends up being a side character. This is a book about four unusually strong women during a time when the world held very different values and female lives were very restricted, a wonderful read , sometimes heartbreakingly tragic .