This is a novel, though its cast of characters reads like a Who's Who of occupied France - Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Albert Camus and the eponymous and curmudgeonly Matisse - and the events described, if they didn't actually happen, probably should have. As the war years drag by the artists grow gently older, withdrawing from the appalling present into a kinder past of blessed memory; the rhythm of the turning years gives the book a documentary feel, and the vivid insights into painting and painters a biographical one, but Everett's clever focus on a nucleus of characters who revolve around the arrestingly intelligent Elsa, provides the story with a pulsating and very human heart.
A.W.