A prolonged love affair: The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, reviewed |
For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they later lapsed into painful, drink-sodden obscurity.
Damian Barr’s novel, The Two Roberts, is a tender and evocative act of resurrection. It portrays the men’s lives from the time of their first meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art to the moment in the mid-1950s when, penniless and out of fashion, they retreated to an ancient cottage in Suffolk. Meticulous in its verisimilitude, it is the story of a prolonged love affair – one that was tentative in the beginning, and urgent (sometimes blazingly fractious) in later years.
More than anything, The Two Roberts is a study of divergent characters: the voluble, bold Bobby MacBryde and the quieter, coiled Robert Colquhoun; the one Catholic and poor, the other Presbyterian and hailing from a more arriviste but no less stifling background. ‘Robert never forgets a word. Bobby never forgets a feeling’ – such an antithesis, typical of Barr’s compressed style, evinces their temperaments.
Barr has drawn upon a........