Portrait of a Medieval Lady

In

her immensely popular 2000 novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier created a fictional backstory for a famous 17th century work of art. In her new book, The Lady and the Unicorn (Dutton; 250 pages), she has created a fictional backstory for a famous 15th century work of art. It would seem the author is only too happy to be pegged as reliably formulaic. This will no doubt attract fans of the earlier novel (the movie adaptation of which is now in theaters), but it also invites inevitable comparisons, and in this regard, the new book stumbles.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, which concerns the Vermeer portrait of a delicate young woman with an intense gaze, was all sublimated passion and quiet decorum. The Lady and the Unicorn centers on the series of tapestries that today hang in Paris' Musee National du Moyen Age depicting a woman's seduction of a unicorn. Not surprisingly, the proceedings are more overtly carnal. The story begins in 1490 when the painter Nicolas des Innocents, whose appetites pointedly contradict his name, is commissioned by the wealthy Parisian Jean Le Viste to design six tapestries glorifying the nobleman's status at court. Nicolas, like most of the characters, is fictional, though a Jean Le Viste did exist in the Middle Ages, and his family's coat of arms appears in the tapestries. Other than that, little is known about the works, so Chevalier imagines that during a consultation at the Le Viste estate, Nicolas meets Jean's estranged wife Genevieve, prim and tense, as well as her nubile and headstrong teenage daughter Claude. Prodded by Genevieve, and overcome by his urge to "plow" Claude, Nicolas persuades Jean to replace his plans for battle scenes with the unicorn motif, imagining himself as the mythical beast.

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All this comes to pass in the first 30 pages, dispensing early on with the fundamental mystery of why the tapestries might have been woven in the first place. The drama in the following 200-odd pages is stirred up when Nicolas travels to Brussels to oversee the tapestries' production and, with his randy ways, disrupts the family of Georges de la Chapelle, the weaver hired to implement the designs. Nicolas flirts with Georges's blind daughter Alienor, thereby upsetting Georges and his wife Christine, who are already anxious because of the nearly impossible deadline Le Viste has set for the job's completion. But the painter is also compelled by the mother and daughter, and they inspire him to alter some features of the woman in his designs.

The narrative point of view shifts among all the aforementioned characters and a few more, but each is given only the most perfunctory motivations, and their emotions lack subtext, perhaps because of the large number of people involved. Chevalier does a nice job of evoking the physical conditions of the era — the muddy roads and poorly lit, dank rooms — and her descriptions of the weaving process are interesting without getting overly technical. The Lady and the Unicorn is satisfying in its familiarity, but ultimately it feels less rewarding than Pearl Earring, mostly because we've seen the technique before.