Review of The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

[sheenaghpugh]

If he’s lying by omission then it’s only as all storytellers lie: they tell what makes the story work and they don’t tell what they must not; nor what they cannot.

In 1627, Gillis Vervloet, known as Gil, is a man of 79, seeking to end his life as a monk at an abbey in Saarland. But because, in his far-back youth, he was involved in some dubious activities, his admission to the abbey depends on two things: doing the abbey a favour via some detective work involving a statue looted and possibly destroyed during the religious wars of those times, and an account of his life that he is writing to help the abbot decide whether he is suitable.

There is a split narrative from then on, between 1627 and Gil’s youth. In addition we see some of the account he is writing, from which it becomes clear that the abbot is getting a heavily edited version of the story that we, as readers, are hearing from Gil. Indeed there are sixty years for which we do not see this account, and it is implied that whatever else Gil told of these years, he cannot have included the profession he practised then, or the abbey doors would surely be shut to him.

Most of the narrative takes place in the Low Countries – Antwerp and Brussels, mainly – between the years 1562 when the 15-year-old Gil arrives in Antwerp and somewhere around 1567, when he has to flee abroad. They are eventful years, dominated by religious strife and Gil’s friendship with the artist Pieter Bruegel, who takes him on as an artist’s model and to keep his accounts. Gil also models for other painters and sculptors and there is an intriguing possibility that he may have modelled for the very statue he is seeking.

Gil’s life at this point in his youth is complicated by the involvement of his brother Roeland and his religious mentor the priest Paulus in reform movements which could get them and all their associates into trouble with the Inquisition. His other problem is that though his greatest wish is to be a priest himself, his attraction to women, and to the idea of marriage and a family, is almost equally strong. He is continually having to choose between friendship and duty (as he sees it), and between the religious life and his natural inclinations.

A major factor in the religious strife of the time is the question of images, which ties into Gil’s search for the statue. Paulus the reformist priest objects to the whole idea of earthly representation of holy images; ‘But in kneeling to lead-white and madder, and to the image of a lazy servant girl and a lewd apprentice paid by the hour to represent the saints, a man plants God’s gift of adoration into the sinful earth of his gross and worldly desires.’  This could not be further removed from Bruegel’s ethos in painting, as expressed in a conversation with Gil: ‘Why do you draw drunkards? Or criminals?’ ‘Because they’re men, and men get drunk and so do women, and they’re proud, and wrathful, and they fornicate. So I need them for my pictures.’ ‘So you paint sin?’ ‘Men sin, and women too. Wrong-doing – malice and hurt – or folly, or simply what we break by our own carelessness…they’re in our nature.’ All his life, Gil is torn between seeking fulfilment in the religious or the secular, between idealism and nature, and it may seem that at the end of his life he has opted for the former, but a key passage earlier suggests that it is Bruegel’s view of the world that has influenced him more:

 ‘It was on the long, damp trudge back home to Antwerp that happiness came on him suddenly, like sunshine. It was in the moment he stooped to talk to a dog who reminded him of Pelle, and when he broke his limping stride to help an old man and his even older wife over a stile. It overflowed when he came on a woman at a crossroads weeping over a newborn baby as she sought the White Sisters’ orphanage at Middelheim. He could say with truth that the Sisters would be good to the baby and were very holy and loving, and when he left her and the child with the portress she was quite calm, her face softened if not smiling, and reconciled to her sacrifice. And in all that ordinary road was nothing glorious: no beauty among the dripping hedgerows and the cow-pats, no glory of angels in those sodden skies, no high majesty and passion in the sacrifice, no joy in being reconciled to sorrow…only the happiness granted to an ordinary witness to these ordinary things.’

In a time of murderous religious intolerance, Gil eventually seems to come close to believing, with Elizabeth I, that ‘there is only one Christ Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles”.  He also comes to see that concepts like “truth” and “memory” are not as clear-cut as some imagine and that ‘people are lots of things’, as Bruegel paints them, unlike the saints his fellow-servant Doortje recalls from the orphanage of her childhood:

‘the saints they taught us in the Maagdenhuis – I shouldn’t say it, I suppose – but they were so simple. Like the puppets at the Poesje Theatre: carved to be good, or bad, and the same – just wood – all through. You never wonder what they’re thinking, the way you do with Mijnheer’s people.’

Gil, looking at one such painting, reflects, ‘it was the Bruegel Gil had always known – a true Bruegel if not the only true Bruegel – who had painted it. Gil could not accept Bruegel’s faith, any more than he could accept Roeland’s. But each was a good man, and a wise man – most of the time – and surely the rest of it all could be left to God’.

The end of the book, where sixty years are skipped over in a few paragraphs, did feel somewhat rushed to me. In a way, this is inevitable given the novel’s structure. It is the events between 1562 and 1567 that Gil is trying to justify to the abbot, plus for his own safety he needs to conceal from him much of what happened afterwards. But given that Bruegel had been so important to him, it seems odd that his early death in 1569 doesn’t rate a mention – it would have happened while Gil was abroad, but we are told they kept in touch by letter.

One reason this struck me, though, is that Bruegel is such a towering character in the novel – fully realised, fully rounded, as contradictory and exasperating as humans generally are. He comes alive as Doortje’s wooden saints did not. So, and this is important in a historical novel, do the place and time.