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

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Beyond what we have just said, very little is known of Tiepolo's childhood and one has to wait until 1719 for documented facts to become available. 1719 was the year of his marriage to Maria Cecilia Guardi, sister to the veduta ("view") painters: brothers Gian Antonio and Francesco Guardi. Maria bore Tiepolo no fewer than ten children (two of whom would take up painting and became apprentices to their father). Following his marriage, his dark, fledgling style - owing much to the chiaroscuro of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta - became lighter, his palate more brilliant and his touch noticeably more elegant. Tiepolo had learnt the rudiments of fresco from Lazzarini but it was Piazzetta, Ricci, and above all Veronese, who would exert the greatest influence over him.

Professor Lamb goes off the rails. The novel is not told in the first person, but it is entirely from his point of view, so in one sense he is an unreliable narrator. We learn of his suppressed homosexuality, his incipient alcoholism, his yearning for a young art student called Ben, and his refusal to accept just about anything of the modern world – until towards the end, when the dam holding his passions finally bursts. The problem is that it does so in a way we are meant to find squalid and sinister; and at times I entertained the suspicion that the entire novel is itself Professor Lamb’s reverie; and indeed, the whole tone of the novel has the clammy cling of an unsettlingly bad dream. His move to London yields even more of these scandals, alongside a slow-burning realisation about his sexuality and about what he has been too oblivious to see along. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don’s turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable’ Financial Times There is a clash of two worlds in the novel: the classical and the contemporary. What inspired you to explore the space in between?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. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Basically, it's a whole book of meandering plots and plot holes. No answers are ever given to the questions raised and to be honest no thought to the context of them.

It could be that his faithfulness to his studies at an age when he should have been experiencing sexual awakening has largely been the cause of this naivety. Later on, when we meet him, he is going out into the world to crash into a sort of mid-life-latent-adolescent crisis that he nevertheless embraces with poise, shored up by his understanding of classical art and its history.Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge’ Michael Donkor, Guardian 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.