This soap opera focuses on the friendships and loves of two on the face of it very different characters: upper class lesbian art historian Evelyn Skinner and East End maker of geographical globes, forty years her junior and improbably named Ulysses Temper. They are tenuously linked by a chance meeting in Italy near the end of the Second World War, where Evelyn is trying to save priceless paintings from the clutches of the Nazis, and Ulysses is a young soldier fighting the Fascists. In this, Evelyn heightens his budding appreciation of art, although this seems due more to the influence of his commanding officer Darnley, who takes him to visit old churches in odd moments between the shelling. Both harbouring nostalgic memories of their encounter, Ulysses and Evelyn are fated to meet again, but not for more than two decades.

Perhaps owing to her acting experience, Sarah Winman has an eye for comic scenes, even in the midst of tragedy, and an ear for slick, wisecracking dialogue, until it becomes serious in the mouths of say, Evelyn or  oddball autodidact Cress, and risks sounding pretentious. The lack of “speech marks” does not bother me, and in fact serves to aid the narrative flow. I was more irritated by the uneven style, which swings between the extremes of overblown prose and chatty sound bites very likely to start with ‘spect or s’pose  or simply omit any verbs. The intrusive narrator is all too fond of telling us what is, or is not, about to happen now, not just yet, or not at all.

I understand the escapist appeal of a tightknit group of characters who can rub along despite their differences in the community based on an East End pub, or Italian “pensione”, and the novel could certainly inspire a visit to Florence, or trigger an interest in its history, including the devastating flood of 1966, or in the city’s art, if one takes the trouble to look up the references to painters and particular masterpieces.

Yet  the tone is generally too sentimental for my taste, with a plot which relies far too often on coincidence, or implausible events like the dramatic rescue of a man on the point of suicide from a roof in Florence, or  the smuggling of anaesthetised parrot  Claude across the Channel in a suitcase,  although he survives to spout Shakespeare at his bemused audience.  The tendency to exaggeration and caricature often makes it hard to take the characters seriously, and seems to encourage a false “feel good” sensation over lives which are in many ways quite sad. The most likeable and  nuanced character is Ulysses, whose at times frustrating passivity masks a deep, unexpressed  grief  which goes beyond his love for a beautiful, damaged woman who is incapable of committing to him.  The novel is at least a hundred pages too long, and would have benefitted from a ruthless editing of some repetition and banal padding.

“Still Life” is a bestseller, which must have delighted many readers. If you are not one of these, I am not sure it is worth wading through every page, but having done so for a book group, at least it should provide plenty of meat for analysis of  social change in the second half of the C20,  whether the novel gives a truthful impression of life for gay people in that period,  and of the work as a piece of creative writing in general.