Mrs Hemingway — Naomi Wood

What Naomi Wood attempts she pretty much pulls of, though I have a few slight reservations. She is wise enough to note in an afterword that her novel Mrs Hemingway ‘is a work of imagination’ and readers are advised to bear that in mind.

It also helps if you have read a biography of Hemingway and know about his life: various allusions, not least to the titles of some of his stories, will make more sense, and some allusions might make no sense at all if you have not (although that isn’t the end of the world).

As for ‘a work of imagination’ compared to ‘a biography’, those who have read one - or preferably two or three - will realise that some incidents are ‘invented’. For example the first Mrs Hemingway’s condition that Hemingway and the woman who became the second Mrs Hemingway should spend 100 days apart to test their commitment was not invented, but Hadley Richardson did not make it in the South of France but in Paris.

As for the encounter between Martha Gelhorn and Mary Welsh, I haven’t come across any other reference to it in anyone else’s work, and can only assume that, too, as well as Hemingway rooting around in Hotel Ritz garbage for a poem written on loo paper.

Readers will, ideally, have read two or three biography to realise the scale of inventions (which is not too great, however) and preferably the later works are more critical of the writer than earlier works which were either too adoring and convinced of Hemingway’s genius.

I have to say that Hemingway, described by his sons as ‘a good father’ who could be kind, was in fact a great deal more monstrously self-centred than Wood portrays, and it now seems certain that in the final 16 years of his life his alcoholism was playing havoc with his mental health.

As for Wood’s style it is consistent and readable, although once or twice (or even three or four times) she does veer a little too close to upmarket Mills & Boon (or as the Guardian noted ‘chick-lit’). This is not necessarily a bad thing as many readers might actually like it. I, though, don’t.

In fact, I’m engaged on a project which involves reading a great deal about Hemingway – who I don’t much rate as a writer, it has to be said — and bought the book assuming it was non-fiction. It isn’t. I do not mean to be sexist but this one strikes me as more of novel for the girls.

My rating of three stars simply reflects that this isn’t really the kind of work I like to read. Other readers have given it four stars, presumably because it is the kind of work they like to read. And that is fair, too.

It is only fair to conclude that Wood has pulled of what she attempted. I would, though, have liked the only truly fictional character in the novels, Harry Cuzzemanto, to have been fleshed out a little more. On the face of it, there seems not reason at all to include him.