The novel, which comes with glowing back-jacket comments from Augustus John’s biographer Michael Holroyd and from Dominic Smith, author of the popular The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016), begins with a series of set pieces – at a party in a bohemian café, in the studio, during a visit to Augustus’s wife Ida and their children – in which the characters do little else but play out, rather tediously, their sexual jealousies. Male members are sometimes a squirrel in the trousers, sometimes a ‘widow and two orphans’, and are quick to be unbuttoned. Gwen’s apparent imaginings sometimes make for a disconcerting read: what are we to make of this isolated non sequitur, when Augustus John puts on his coat after a family lunch to join his friends in a cafe: ‘Augustus was an unstoppable force of nature, spewing semen down the high street like a broken fire hydrant.’

This initial section does not bring to life the London artistic milieu of the period, although the names of various well-known figures are mentioned. Then Gwen decides to remove their shared model Dorothy McNeill, or ‘Dorelia’, from her brother’s sphere of influence, with a wild plan of walking to Rome. Ostensibly, this is to alleviate Ida’s troubled frame of mind, but in reality it is in the hope of seducing the beautiful Dorelia herself.

The story becomes more lively as the two women travel to France in the Autumn of 1903, walking barefoot, in stolen clothes, carrying an easel and paint box and their belongings in baskets, sleeping rough. From the dock at Bordeaux, they journey arduously to Toulouse, following the course of the river Garonne for some 246 kilometres south, apparently penniless despite the fact that Gus has given them £10 before their departure. Finally, in company with a commercial illustrator called Leonard, based on the Belgian artist Leonard Broucke, who becomes Dorelia’s lover, they take a train to Paris to seek out Rodin. A year later, Gwen parts from Dorelia and is finally accepted as a model by the bear-like Rodin, who treats her, body and soul, as she once treated Dorelia.

Goldie Goldbloom (photograph by Melania Avanzata)

Much of the rest of the novel is taken up with John’s obsessive affair with Rodin, who sees her only clandestinely but pays for her lodgings. In the book’s last sections, Goldbloom imposes on Gwen the task of commemorating, by prescience, the children of the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, a Nazi deportation of 4,000 Jewish children in which the French police were shamefully complicit.

Goldbloom is a talented writer who combines historical research with a vivid imagination, but the two don’t always meld convincingly. Anachronisms of language and manners render inauthentic the cultural milieu, even in these libidinous bohemian circles. Gwen is only sometimes convincing, either as a tormented woman or as an artist. Some secondary characters, such as Leonard, exist only as names, although Gwen’s friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is lovingly imagined.

I put down this book with very mixed feelings. A primary rule of reviewing is not to review the book that you think the author should have written, but when a novel purports to be based on the lives of real figures from the recent past, it must engender a willing suspension of disbelief, and a sense that the work is revealing a richer truth than the available historical facts allow. One winces at times for the ghosts of Goldbloom’s subjects, whose sins and virtues, whatever they were, were probably different from these. Goldbloom has bent John’s life rather too far towards her own agenda and to her own anxiety at the horrors the future held for the Jews of Paris. The novel veers giddily from trashy to literary, while parts are merely repetitious. Nevertheless, it is an exciting, if flawed, ride.