Shades of Grey by Bristol novelist Greg McGregor is the compelling love story of the relationship between Anne McCarthy, an innocent young English artist, and Jack Freedman, a worldly American black market art wheeler and dealer. Freedman is a lover of art and is well versed in the art of love. Anne is his pupil both as artist and lover.
The book is set against the backdrop of Paris in the 1950s and the descriptions of this bohemian society recovering from the trauma of the Second World War are wonderfully evocative. The detail of the images of fashion, art, food and drink give the book a cinematic quality to the extent that you almost expect Harry Lime from The Third Man to make a cameo appearance.
Jack and Anne dominate the plot, but they leave room for a variety of creatively drawn characters to weave their way into the narrative, often at the shabby-chic Monmatre hotel the Suisse, Paris, Nice where Jack and Anne meet. The hotel is home to a likeable ‘family’ of long-term residents who have been drawn to Paris to take part in the adventure of post-war reconstruction. It’s difficult to imagine a more exciting place to be on the planet than Paris in those few anarchic, idealistic, yet compassionate years after the war, such is the intensity with which Greg McGregor paints her images of the city.
The finest passages in Shades of Grey are when art becomes interwoven with the relationships. Jack and Anne’s visits to museums and opening nights, their discussions about Rodin, their meeting with Salvador Dali and others, Anne spending her days sketching at the Louvre, provide intriguing metaphors for the state of their relationship. The theme is one of innocence and experience set against a black market art world – Anne’s naivety and idealism versus Jack smuggling lost art treasures out of the country.
McGregor tells the story with flair. At times the dialogue seems uneasy, but the plot is driven by a compelling relationship while the attention to detail in the descriptions of Paris in the half light of the post-war years is absorbing.
Richard Jones
Shades of Grey, Greg McGregor,£6.95,McGregor Artistry (ISBN:0953905608)
Shades of Grey is the first part of a trilogy. It is available from wwwbristolbooksandpublishers.co.uk or from Marketing Enterprises, 16 Freeland Place, Bristol BS8 4NP. Tel:01179494527
