THE LADY AND THE UNICORN, by Tracy Chevalier

 The Unicorn's Garden

Tracy Chevalier seems to have decided to make a career out of writing novels about well-known works of art.  Which is fine by me.  I have read some snotty comments by some reviewers about this, but mostly the reviews of her latest work have been entirely positive.  I have loved the tapestries that are the subject of this book since I first saw them in the Cluny Museum in Paris (the museum is now called La Musée National du Moyen Age).  I was a Romance Language major in college, and spent my junior year in Tours, France, putatively studying French, though really studying France itself: food, wine, art, music, beaches, jazz clubs, food, wine, art, repeat ad infinitum.  In addition, I was in love (still am, I admit it) with the Middle Ages, so the Cluny was my favorite Paris museum. I revisited the tapestries as often as possible, and to this day cherish the prints of them that I bought a lifetime ago.  So, needless to say, I have been anxious to read this novel since I first heard that Chevalier was working on it.

A short recap of the plot from Reviews of Books: 

In The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) returns with another novel of historical fiction, this time centering around a tapestry. Nicolas des Innocents is a Parisian artist and ladies man who is commissioned by a rich nobleman, Jean Le Viste, to design tapestries depicting him in heroic battles. Nicolas convinces him to let the tapestries depict a unicorn which can only be tamed by a chaste woman. Traveling between Paris and Brussels, Nicolas directs his libidinous appetites toward three young women, including Le Viste's daughter. Tracy Chevalier has again captured the characters and nuances of the past in her fictionalized account of the creation of a work of art. The Age calls The Lady and the Unicorn, "a novel so graceful in its confidence and economy, so effortlessly readable, that some churls will probably dismiss its American author as a lightweight. That would be to mistake deftness for lack of depth."

A very brief recounting it is, too.   But quite sufficient to give you an idea of the story.  The story is told in the voices of seven characters involved, from the artist who first paints the designs for the tapestries, through the weaver who masterfully brings them to life, to the weaver's blind daughter Aliénor (my favorite character) - a mix of people from different classes  (one almost has to say castes, they were so separate) and milieux.  We see a busy picture of life in Paris and Brussels of the late 15th century, the century that brought us all the marvelous tapestries in the European museums.  These tapestries, along with the Books of Hours done during those times, actually give us much of what we know about life of that time.  We experience the bustling streets, the raucous taverns, life in a noble house, and most delightfully the weaver's garden, where Aliénor tends the flowers and herbs that serve as models for the mille fleurs that fill in the backgrounds of the tapestries.

This is not a historical treatise however, it's a novel.  So it's a love story, or several, a story of two families and the tapestries that tie them together, a story of an art form and how it evolves.  I have long been fascinated by fabric arts, by weaving in particular, so find the technical details of the weaver's workshop to be one of the more interesting aspects of the book.  The characters are all somewhat stylised  -entirely as things should be, I think, for a novel about such a stylised art form- we don't see too deeply into many of their hearts.  They are all, to me, more like figures on a tapestry, or in an illustrated Book of Hours, lovely figures living  life at a remove, giving us glimpses of another time and place, one we can gaze at and love, though only from a distance.

Here is Aliénor and her garden:  "People are always surprised by my garden.  It has six squares, laid out as a cross, with the fruit trees - apple and plum and cherry - at the corners.  Two squares are of vegetables, where I grow cabbages, leeks, peas, lettuce, radishes, celery.  One square is of straberries and herbs - which is where I was weeding... I am happiest in my garden. It is the safest place in the world.  I know every plant, every tree, every stone, every clod of dirt.  It is surrounded by a trellis of willow and covered with thorny roses to keep out animals and strangers.  Most often I am alone in my garden.  Birds do come in and sit on the fruit trees, stealing cherries when they are ripe.   Butterflies fly among the flowers, though I know little of them.  Sometimes when I am sitting still I've felt the air stirred near my cheek or arm from their fluttering, but I've never touched one.  Papa told me there is dust on their wings that comes off when you touch it.  Then the butterfly can't fly, and birds eat it.  So I leave them alone and have others describe them to me."

Woven into the tapestries are allusions to the physical senses, but it is in Aliénor's voice that we come most into contact with sensual references and passages.  Through the girl without sight we perhaps see more than through any other character.  I liked this book very much, and will retain visual images from it for quite some time, bright before my inner eyes.