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

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Don Lamb, distinguished professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the protagonist of Tiepolo Blue, is only forty-three, but while reading the novel I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. In Tiepolo Blue, an absorbing coming-of-age story that charts the artistic and sexual awakening of a Cambridge professor in 1990s London, they collide with the classical forms of the Italian Old Masters. However, thanks to his new-found freedom, he soon encounters a world his former life had screened him from and starts to question his previously blinkered views on art, the world and his relationships. Two putti draw back the gilded curtains as if opening a play or an opera with the resulting negative space serving as a proscenium through which to view the nuptials of the Emperor.

I was gripped by the way this story unravels to show us the life of Don Lamb, a professor at Cambridge who is obsessed with the artwork of Tiepolo, and whose various disgraces and scandals seem to layer as he progresses through life. The plot: Professor Don Lamb is an art historian at Peterhouse, Cambridge’s oldest and weirdest college. When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don’s abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum.To this end, Tiepolo's dramatic narratives were often tallied with a noticeable degree of sparseness.

His friendship with Anna, the wife of a rather oleaginous rival at the Brockwell Collection, is a grounding element amid this mobility and liveliness.In writing the book, did you have to consciously stop thinking as an academic and start thinking as a novelist? My thesis looked at contemporary art in Britain in the late 20th century in relation to classical statues and myths, and their sort of strange, trans-historical relationship. 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. You wouldn’t want to start writing a novel in the mode of an academic thesis, or at least not unless it was a conscious experimental decision.