I thought a great deal of, and subsequently about, Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, which was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was an exploration and novelisation of the life of the painter Yves Klein, and its inclusion both pleased and surprised me as it is radically different to our normal ideas of what constitutes “historical fiction”. If only I had infinite time I would certainly care to read his other two works, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club. This new novel – is it a novel? – is a similarly heterogenous volume. It is a novel, in that there is a perceptible narrative arc and it is written in prose. But the prose is always on the edge of being a prose-poem, and parts of it are elided with art criticism and philosophical reflections on the nature of the creative process. I should say at the outset it haunted me afterwards, and although it might only find “fit audience though few” to quote John Milton, it is nevertheless a work of seriousness, empathy and beauty.

As with Blue Postcards it involves art; in this case the photomontage sequence The New World by the Scottish artist Alan Smith. Although the narrator of the book – who is working on a photo-montage sequence – is emphatically not a version of Smith, the Author’s Note mentions he returned to creating art after a self-imposed hiatus on receiving a diagnosis of a gravely serious illness. Bruton never met Smith, but did meet his widow (in the company of Richard Demarco, which in itself might well have been a scene to be novelised. The novel would be rather longer than its 112 pages otherwise). The novel begins with a prologue from “the Writer”, then a series of 11 chapters, each of which relates to one of Smith’s pictures. The artist creating these images is unnamed; but we know that he is elderly. His wife, also unnamed, “watched him, looked for signs of where the pain was, noticed the way he used his body to soften the hidden smart and sting, but the pain was still there in his face”. He takes a snap – a very Demarco habit – which is the nucleus of but not the inspiration for the magnum opus: The New World.

It is a work by Giandomenico Tiepolo called Il Mondo Nuovo. It is not a work that I knew, and it is not by his father, the more famous Giambattista Tiepolo. Originally a fresco, it exists in multiple versions, whether copies or the original artist’s reworkings uncertain. A novelist friend, who studied at art college, and I spent some time studying reproductions of it and agreed it is a brilliant and very weird piece of art: not least because the array of people mostly have their backs turned to the spectator. As the “old artist” thinks, “people in galleries – watch them flitting from one picture to the next. They confuse looking with seeing, spending so little time on any individual picture that they miss what the artist was trying to show them”.

The old artist uses his snap to interrogate Tiepolo’s work, enlisting the help of a young woman, Livvy, who has eyes that are “forget-me-not blue that he will one day forget”. Blue is the internal rhyme of the narrative. There is a blue-and-white porcelain willow-pattern cup, a blue woollen hat, certain blue pills that might help with erectile dysfunction, and Tiepolo the Elder is always associated with the pigment Tiepolo Blue. Their collaboration is also a space to discuss any number of things. The conversations with Livvy encompass love, art, the spark, mortality and a lot more as they jigsaw together different pictures into a form of story, with the original photograph somewhere, even if absent. Although I think the publishers have done an admirable job on the reproductions, it might have been an idea to have a website with the images in a form whereby you could zoom and peer into them, since so much here is about detail.

The pictures are intriguing; Bruton’s prose in aphoristic and almost neoclassically restrained. He can move between almost pawky asides – “I just want to see the sea... to check that it is still there”, to the aching, as in “he does not know if there is meaning in that, in the dropping and the breaking and the not going back together”. Or even the pondering about whether we dream in colour, and if we do, are they the right colours? The book does have its postmodernist twist. Any alert reader will be sensitised to one question, “what is the relationship between Livvy and the old artist’s wife?” rather than the relationship between Livvy and the old artist. It is a book about forgetting, erasure, and it is suffused with a melancholy that is hard to do well, as in it is hard not to be sentimental or maudlin or self-pitying. The clue is in plain sight all along. The New World, a place which is different and confusing and fulfilling and bustling and estranged, is old age.

With Or Without Angels, by Douglas Bruton, Fairlight Books, £9.99

Book review: With Or Without Angels, by Douglas Bruton