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    Headlong
    Headlong
    Headlong
    Audiobook12 hours

    Headlong

    Written by Michael Frayn

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Celebrated for his playwriting, British author Michael Frayn has also written screenplays and several acclaimed novels. Headlong, a Booker Prize finalist, combines a heavy dose of humor with a fascinating glimpse into the world of priceless art. When Martin Clay and his art historian wife are asked to appraise the private collection of a loutish man, it is Martin, not his wife, who believes he has discovered a lost masterpiece from Dutch painter Bruegel. Keeping his thoughts closely guarded, he embarks on a fast-paced quest to confirm his suspicions. In an effort to swindle the painting away from its owner, Martin heads down a trail of lies and scams that has hilarious and unexpected results. Frayn's novel is both an entertaining, slapstick romp through one man's personal odyssey and a fascinating glimpse into the world of art history. Narrator Steven Crossley captures each moment of discovery without missing a beat through all of Martin's bumbling and scheming.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 26, 2011
    ISBN9781461810438
    Headlong
    Author

    Michael Frayn

    Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which received the Whitbread Novel Award. He has also written a memoir, My Father's Fortune, and fifteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.

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    Reviews for Headlong

    3.5/5

    353 ratings25 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An enjoyable book providing you don't squint at the plot too closely and just soak up its comedy. It piques your interest in Breughel too; sending you scurrying away to find out background information. Not the heaviest of reads but most entertaining.
    • 1/5
      I found this book hard work to get through. The premise seemed to suggest a fast-paced comic adventure and the fact it has art as its theme really appealed to me. However I had a number of problems with this book. I didn't like the main character. He came across as a bit too pompous and I didn't enjoy being in his head. And he was so indecisive, reaching a decision, changing his mind and going in circles, it became frustrating and at times I lost what his actual train of thought was. The story itself was a good one, and could have been enjoyable, but it became clogged with essays about art history that interrupted the story a bit too much - I didn't actually read these parts and didn't feel that I'd missed anything. Not that I don't have an interest in the history of art, I really do, but I felt as though I was reading two books at the same time. It just didn't work for me.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyed the Bruegel mystery tour very much, and the first third of the book while it was setting the scene. But for me the farce of the last third of the book didn't really succeed and I did skip over quite a bit of the last few chapters, wanting to hear the plot but not all the detail.
    • 4/5
      Martin Clay, is a philosopher who moves in to a country cottage with his art-historian wife and infant daughter on the pretext that getting away from the hustle of bustle of London will mean that he will finally be able to knuckle down and work on the book that he has never really got started. On arrival into the country they are invited to have dinner with their neighbours, the Churts. The Churts' estate is run down and Tony Churt is seemingly always on the lookout on ways to make quick bit cash, and has an ulterior motive in asking them over. Tony wants the Clays to have a look at some old paintings that he wants to unload. He doesn't trust the big auction houses and hopes the Clays can give a valuation and find a way of selling them without him having to pay fees or commission. There is a huge and ghastly picture by Giordano that Tony and three minor Dutch scenes. However, it is last painting that Martin is shown that he becomes really interested in. He believes that this a missing masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel. Afraid that the Churts will simply sell it to the highest bidder and that it will disappear in to a private collection somewhere abroad and wanting the renown as it's discoverer, Martin decides that he won't tell the the Churts what he suspects and hatches a plan to get it for himself.Martin's wife Kate isn't convinced about it's authenticity so he sets out to prove his theory whilst at the same time trying to figure out how to get Tony to part with it without arousing his suspicion. Martin thinks that Tony is just a gullible country bumpkin but he soon learns that he more devious than he initially thought. To complicate matters even further Tony's wife, Laura, starts to make sexual advances towards Martin which only puts further stress on the Clay's own marriage. The story quickly turns into a rather simple and rather entertaining little farce running alongside a more serious examination into the painter's life and the circumstances that might have led to this particular piece of work's disappearance, along the way giving an insight into a turbulent period of Dutch history. One that I for one knew nothing about.The overall plot is perhaps a little thin and slightly out of balance (a little too weighted towards the art history) but on the whole I felt that Frayn juggled these two very different story-lines extremely well. The farce element kept me amused whilst the theories and history made for fascinating reading. The ending when it arrived was well executed and overall I found this a brisk and entertaining read that,if asked, would certainly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Michael Frayn's "Headlong" (1999) turns alternately from comic novel to lively art history and back again. The novel is terrific, except for those repeated interruptions, and perhaps the same could be said for the art history, if art history were one's purpose for reading a novel.The story concerns a British philosopher, Martin Clay, who with his wife, Kate, flees to the country to work on his book. She has her own project to work on, plus a new baby to occupy her. No sooner do they arrive at their county house than they are invited to dinner by Tony and Laura Churt, who have a motive other than pure neighborliness. Tony wants a free appraisal of some art he claims was given to him by his deceased mother. He also wants help selling the art for maximum profit without having to pay the commission to someone like Sotheby's.The Clays don't want to get involved, that is until Martin glimpses what he becomes convinced is a missing Bruegel masterpiece. Never mind that his wife is the art expert, Martin wants to do this on his own. He concocts a plan to acquire the painting for a fraction of its worth and sell it for a fortune. He convinces himself this would not be cheating Tony Churt but rather a public service.Of course, things get complicated. For one thing, Laura Churt mistakes Martin's interest in the painting for an interest in her. Why else would he keep coming to the house while Tony was away?Yet the biggest complication turns out to be all that art history that Frayn inserts into the novel. Although this is a work of fiction, the history appears to be true. If so, it is good stuff, at least for anyone with an interest in art history. For those of us just interested in the story about the Clays and the Churts, it proves an annoying detour.With less history this could have been a first rate comic novel. With less plot it could have been a first rate art history.
    • 2/5
      I'm normally a fan of all Frayn's work and count him as one of the best living writers we have. However, I'm sorry to say this book is on the whole a significant error of judgement in a wide variety of ways, and only just managed to redeem itself in the last one hundred pages or so. This isn't enough to make it a great work of literature or even a good book.Here are the issues that are wrong with it:Martin is a dull and weak man, who thinks of himself far more highly than he needs to. As a result, he's neither strong enough nor attractive enough as a character to carry this story.The characters, particularly the wife Kate, are very shadowy indeed and really more caricatures than genuine people.The long and dull ramblings about art and Bruegel are … well … long and rambling. Mind you, the ability to make the magnificent Bruegel dull is itself quite impressive. If Frayn had wanted to write an historical novel, he should have done so, as Martin is not strong enough to make the historical sections interesting. It's more of an info-dump than a narrative.The first 280 or so pages are mind-numbingly tedious.Here are the issues that are right with it:After page 280, the plot suddenly becomes interesting and fast-moving enough for the weak characterisation to be unimportant. Actually, the plot did very much remind me of one of the episodes of Midsomer Murders, but for me that's no bad thing as it's a crime series I enjoy.The Lady of the Manor Laura finally comes into her own at the end of the novel, though she's still sadly underwritten.The final page is spot on, and (possibly, though the jury's still out ...) worth the 280 pages of drivel to get there. Much like Wagner then in that you have to suffer through one hell of a lot of opera boredom to arrive at that glorious final note.Verdict: 2.5 stars (the 0.5 for that end page). Rambling nonsense, with an odd spark of genius here and there.
    • 4/5
      In this book we have two academics who have relocated to the country to write books. They are approached by the cash-poor local gentryman to give him some idea of the value of certain paintings in his decaying mansion. On viewing one of the paintings, Martin, the husband, feels his heart stop, when he believes he is looking at a Breughel. And not just any Breughel, but one of the long-supposed missing paintings from a series of the seasons painted by Breughel. (The Harvesters in the Metropolitan in NYC is one of the series.)The book is somewhat schizophrenic. On the one hand, it is a comedy of errors, as Martin tries to acquire the Breughel without the owner becoming aware of its value, and at the same time must convince his wife that this is the honorable thing to do since the owner will only sell it to a private collector who will keep it in a vault where no one can see this masterpiece. And, Martin discovers, the owner is more wily than suspected, and comes to the table with dirty hands himself.On the other hand, there is a great deal of discussion of art history, focused of course on Netherlandish art and Breughel in particular. I found the art history research fascinating, though it tended at times to interrupt the narrative flow, which might annoy some readers.
    • 3/5
      It didn't take long for me to start to detest the arrogant, pig-headed 'hero' of the book and his bumbling attempts at investigating the origin of a painting while on sabbatical from his job as a university lecturer. How someone so useless and badly-organised could ever have been an academic career, or have hoped to pull off a complicated con like that, is beyond me. He was obsessed by his hopes for his discovery, but failed go about anything in a remotely sensible way. And the patronising and dismissive way he behaved towards his wife made me wish she would put weed-killer in his coffee or a carving knife between his shoulder-blades. Unfortunately he remained alive, but he didn't get what he wanted either, wich mollified me a bit. I know he was supposed to be irritating, but possibly not quite that much!
    • 3/5
      Satisfyingly baroque in its art history mystery, which successfully (if only barely) trumps the dangerously-close-to-off-putting pathos of its scholarly protagonist.
    • 4/5
      Very funny book about a philosopher obsessed with the idea that he has found a lost work of art at one of his country neighbors' house. It's very well written and contains a lot of information about the art world, art history, iconography, etc.
    • 5/5
      One of my absolute favorite books. You may have to be an art historian to love it, but it's so sharp and funny, with a snappy comic plot, that many Frayn fans should like it. If you've ever studied art history, especially in London, the Breughel bits will be fascinating. I highly recommend looking up his paintings while reading this. I sometimes find academic farce a bit twee for my taste, but Headlong avoided that trap.
    • 2/5
      Writing this a few weeks after I finished reading this, I struggle to remember much about it which I guess says a lot. I enjoyed the art history asides but the plot was flim-flam and annoying. Just not a great experience for me.
    • 4/5
      SmashingI noticed this book on the front table at my favorite London bookstore, Hatchards, years ago. Years later I bought it at my local library and only, just now, read it.What a rollicking story involving Tony and Laura Churt, their art and Martin Clay and his wife Kate and daughter Tilda. At first a drama between the four primary personalities, an art history fueled detective story and ultimately a cautionary tale that ends with the thud of the brokenness that results from an obsession laced scam by Martin to sell one of Tony’s art pieces (an alleged long lost Dutch Master) before Tony realizes its value. But then Tony has his own hidden agenda as well. And so we see the consequences of this obsession and the cost that this has on personal relationships.Worth the read.
    • 4/5
      Wow! I've just finished to read the French translation of this book—quite unusual for me because I *hate* reading translations. I didn't like at first the way it was translated because it smelled too much of the original English text and I got the impression that I could easily translate it back into English... But after a while I revised my opinion, and finally I think that the translation is rather good.But I'm not here to expatiate on translation techniques. I want to say that I was pulled in by the story and, contrary to my habits, I really devoured this book. You can find humour in many sentences. It is a very fine mixture between a biography and a thriller. Sometimes, the style reminded me of Nabokov's Lolita; there is another common point between this book and Lolita: both let a criminal narrate the story of his obsession. I balanced for a while between a 3 1/2- and a 4-star rating, that is for me, between 'I highly recommend this book' and 'I'd like to re-read this book if I could find time'. As many other reviewers here, I regret not having had reproductions of Bruegel's paintings at hand while reading. And this explains my 4-star rating, because I'd really like to re-read it with a pictorial support. I think I would enjoy it still more.
    • 5/5
      Thoroughly delightful novel about possibly finding an overlooked masterpiece.
    • 4/5
      This book was shortlisted for the Booker in 1999, and this was how it caught my attention. I’ve had it on my TBR pile for at least four or five years, but I ended up reading it after discovering that it was available on CDs at the library.It mingles literary fiction with art history and some really interesting art analysis.The plot takes us to England at the end of the twentieth century to the country not far from London, where Martin – a young and awfully wimpy academic, a philosopher and art history specialist, is going to spend a few months in a cottage with his wife, who also specializes in art history, and their three-month-old daughter. As luck would have it, during a get to know dinner with the neighbouring landowner, Martin thinks he has discovered a long lost Breughel blocking the chimney, and he embarks on a scheme to weasel it out from the owner’s hands without the owner ever suspecting anything. With that the action starts, and a slew of comic events unfolds.I didn’t think I would enjoy this book so much since from the very beginning we know that no new Breughel has recently been discovered, so the whole story must somehow go awry. Still, to his great credit, Frayn managed to keep me interested and even got me more interested as the story went on. He packed a lot of art history into it, as well as history of the Spanish rule in the Netherlands during the times of William of Orange, and created a character that excelled at self-deception.It all ended up being enjoyable, suspenseful and extremely funny.
    • 3/5
      A well-written book, but not for those with little prior knowledge of Dutch history and art!
    • 5/5
      Who knew art history could be so entertaining. This is fiction, but there is so much Netherlandish art history it could be considered a textbook for an entry level art appreciation course (the type they teach in school where polite young woman go to earn their MRS degree). Very funny, very smart story. I'll never again look at a landscape without wondering if the tiny detail in some corner is a political statement, or stare up at a large portrait without musing on intimate thoughts.
    • 5/5
      formally and comedically perfect
    • 4/5
      It lumbers along in spots, picks up speed in others, and lands you in a nicely-executed conclusion.
    • 3/5
      Engaging yarn of art history, provenance and all that.
    • 5/5
      Great writing and great fiction that anyone would enjoy, but I especially loved the author's use of art history in the story. Unlike other writers of "art fiction" Frayn actually uses his characters to show what an impact art can have on people. And, he sets forth the question of how do we value art and how can we value art?
    • 4/5
      Maybe you have to be interested in art history or an academic to "get" all the humor of this novel, but I thought it was hysterical. Be prepared to learn more about Bruegel than you wanted to know.
    • 2/5
      Sadly disappointed in this. I'm quite a Frayn fan and the plot/themes promised much but it just somehow didn't quite deliver, perhaps because I had little sympathy with any of the characters.
    • 4/5
      A gripping tale for art lovers