SHORT LIFE IN A STRANGE WORLD

BIRTH TO DEATH IN 42 PANELS TOBY FERRIS Fourth Estate, 336pp, £20

Toby Ferris’s book is the record of what, reviewing it in the Sunday Times, John Carey called ‘the last in a series of crackpot projects’: the author decided, at the age of 42, to go and see each of the 42 surviving paintings by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Though not an expert on the painter, Carey says, Ferris has ‘read the experts and absorbed their knowledge’, and scrutinised the paintings closely, ‘sometimes through binoculars’.

‘Only about half the book is about Bruegel,’ Carey complained. ‘The other half […] belongs to Ferris’s life away from the pictures. At first the two halves interact. The earliest picture he visits is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and it reminds him how he once saw a friend fall from the sky in a paragliding accident. It reminds him, too, of his father’s wartime experiences. Joining up aged 18, he flew in rickety, obsolescent biplanes to attack German battleships. But as the book progresses the two halves come bewilderingly apart.’

The personal sections digress, covering everything from entropy theory to 18th-century French naval officers. ‘Whatever next, the despairing reader wonders? As the subject matter becomes more bizarre the language grows increasingly pretentious.’

The Spectator’s Honor Clerk had mixed feelings about Ferris’s digressive book, which she called ‘intricately plotted’ and ‘by turns stimulating, moving and sometimes mildly pretentious’. It was, finally, ‘compelling in any case’: ‘Ferris is also good at making us look with a new eye at familiar paintings and readers can ask for nothing more of an art book.