Whitney Scharer’s book The Age of Light is set in Paris in the late 1920s. At the time the city was the centre of new movements in art and photography. Into the city comes Lee Miller, a young, beautiful American woman, who begins to work with one of the leading artistic personalities of the day, Man Ray. Ray guides Lee through the beginnings of a career in photography and they become collaborators and lovers. Soon, however, Lee is developing new ideas and becoming successful in her own right which causes a rift and ultimately a betrayal in the relationship.
Both Lee Miller and Man Ray were real people who lived and worked in Paris at this time. Lee later went on to become a war correspondent and some of this story looks back at her time in Europe during WW2 from the 1950s when she is planning a retrospective of her work. Other artists mentioned in the novel are also real people but I don’t know enough about the period to know who is real and who have been invented to drive the story forward. The author also portrays Lee’s father and hints at reasons why she lives so far away from him without making these explicit.
The novel is interesting as a study of an artistic relationship and what happens when the student threatens to be greater than the teacher. The descriptions of the techniques used and the equipment that was needed is well done and if you happen to have seen any of the photos created by Lee Miller then you can see how they relate to the story. I liked the depiction of this community of artists, their infighting and their “modern” attitudes.
The author provides an afterword in which she explains that the basic facts and events of the story are true but that she has invented much of the interaction between the two main characters, trying to keep it true to the spirit of the original people. My research (Google) tells me that the reason why the two parted is not really known so it seems that the author has created events that might explain that. Having seen how much of this story comes from the imagination of the writer I wonder why she just didn’t invent two characters about whom she could make up anything she wanted. I am not fond of historical novels that fill in the historical record as much as this one does.
I have read about Paris at around that time before in The Bones of Paris by Laurie R King (see my review here) and I am pretty sure that passing reference is made to Man Ray in that book but the story here is totally invented, as are most of the characters.
Anne Is Reading 