Light, Descending
The great Victorian polymath, essayist, art historian, social critic John Ruskin is the subject of Randolph’s superb standalone historical novel. It follows Ruskin’s tormented and eventful life along its entire spectrum, from personal – his friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his unconsummated marriage to Effie Gray, his enigmatic affair with teenager Rose LaTouche – to professional, including his championing of artist J. M. W. Turner and, most touchingly, the complicated love affair he enjoyed with the city of Venice as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, trashy and dilapidated.
Randolph’s book is saturated with echoes of Ruskin’s vast body of writing (delightfully, he is quoted in abundance), and her dramatic handling of the ups and downs of his life is so assured and spirited that Light, Descending quickly takes on the feeling of a classic. The whole vibrant intellectual world of the Victorians is brought marvellously to life in the course of the novel, and especially Ruskin himself, a towering figure in his own day but largely forgotten in our own. The result is a smart and stirring novel about a fully lived life of dangerous emotions. Strongly recommended.
