Ian Cooper reviews Taboo by Nigel Halliday.
With the title Taboo and the subtitle “An Artist Comes to Know Good”, you get quite a good clue that this novel is going to be an entertaining satire about modern art.
It is set in the time of so-called Cool Britannia in a suitably depressed provincial city and an art college dedicated to an empty conceptualism. The hero, from a sloughed-off church background and desperate to do real art, finds himself increasingly unable to beat the system and so is forced to join it with hilarious and profitable results.
The author Nigel Halliday has a PhD in Art History and, in the course of an only barely exaggerated story, takes us through a medley of typical art students all out to shock, enrage and break every taboo with their endless, even sophisticated, but hopeless and usually hairy logic. A brave but serious artist and Christian girl is the only exception. Of course, if the students’ basic premise is an angry nihilism demanding attention and significance, and also a career, this parody of true art deserves to be parodied, and Halliday doesn’t disappoint.
But it’s done with an apologetic purpose and a certain compassion for the lost souls searching and longing for truth while denying its possibility. Even the villain of the story, the art lecturer, a former art luminary reduced to teaching and making his students miserable, is portrayed as caring for his disabled wife and finding, just right for a conceptualist, that he enjoys cooking.
While the hero, supported by his patient, generous and pregnant wife, has been able to turn the tables on the humiliations of his last year, and especially on the art lecturer, he doesn’t feel good about it. But in a quite lyrical final section he is faced with the massive good of becoming a parent for the first time. And how to explain that, after all the bleak alternatives of his degree? This is a great read for anyone interested in art or just anyone puzzled by a brick or unmade bed as an art exhibit. Available from Waterstones and on Amazon. Enjoy.
TABOO:
An Artist Comes to Know Good
By Nigel Halliday
Nrvhbooks. 271 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 068 280 504
