The Tiepolo Blue author’s impressive second novel is an enthrallingly intricate portrait of the art world

James Cahill’s first novel, Tiepolo Blue, charted the sexual liberation and psychic disintegration of an uptight Cambridge art historian. It was a bravura performance that more than lived up to its extravagant pre-publication praise. But can his second, The Violet Hour, live up to his first?

Cahill himself is more than aware of the reputational tightrope walk that is a creative career. The Violet Hour features a fictional contemporary artist, Thomas Haller, whose own eminence, from the 1990s onwards, is contrasted with the downbeat experience of perhaps equally talented female artists who are hitting their heads against glass ceilings and brick walls. Despite his success as an abstract painter who has defined himself against the YBA aesthetic, Haller has been on the receiving end of one devastatingly negative review, brilliantly and wittily ventriloquised by Cahill. The motives for it turn out to be complicatedly personal.