The Transformation of Martin Lake first appeared in the anthology Palace Corbie 8 in 1999 and was then included in City of Sanits and Madmen, Volume 1 of Jeff VanderMeer's The Ambergris Trilogy.
"Few painters have risen with such speed from such obscurity as Martin Lake, and fewer still are so closely identified with a single painting, a single city." So begins the narrator's 80-page account of the life, times, and painting of Martin Lake.
I allude to the narrator's opening but are they truly his words? I ask since the unnamed narrator repeatedly shifts into referencing Janice Shriek's A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and his Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition. At times, the shift is seamless, so much so that the reader may wonder where the narrator ends and Shriek begins, a vintage Jeff VanderMeer move to avoid being pinned down at any literary level.
What strikes me most about this VanderMeer novella is how visually stunning it is, reminding me of the lush prose of the supreme masters of visual writing: Théophile Gautier and José Lezama Lima. Indeed, reading The Transformation of Martin Lake brought to mind both Gautier's Mademoiselle Monique and Lezama Lima's Paradiso. As an example, here is a passage in which Lake, deep in a nightmare, observes someone slicing him with a knife: “He could see it all—the yellow of the thin fat layer, the white of bone obscured by the dull red of muscle, the gray of tendons, as surely as if his hand had been labeled and diagrammed for his own benefit. The blood came think and heavy, draining from all of his extremities until he only had feeling in his chest. The pain was infinite, so infinite that he did not try to escape it, but tried only to escape the red gaze of the man who was butchering him while he just stood there and let him do it.”
What is the title of Martin Lake’s one famous painting—the work that vaulted him from a mediocre creator of collages and acrylics to a celebrated painter in oils, and that would come to define both the artist and the city of Ambergris itself? The answer: Invitation to a Beheading. Of course, this title brings to mind a classic of 20th-century literature: the novel of the same name by none other than Vladimir Nabokov, in which a thirty-year-old teacher is sentenced to death by the state for the crime of “gnostical turpitude.”
As for Lake’s painting, VanderMeer provides much detail. For starters: “The piece marks the beginning of the grotesqueries, the controlled savagery of his oils—the slashes of emerald slitting open the sky, the deft, tinted green of the windows looking in, the moss green of the exterior walls.” You’ll have to read VanderMeer’s novella for a fuller sense of the connections between Nabokov’s novel and Lake’s painting.
VanderMeer employs all of his storytelling magic to give readers a vivid, memorable tale in exquisite detail: the conflicts—occasionally violent in the extreme—between the greens and the reds, that is, those who judged the recently deceased legendary composer Voss Bender as either hero (the greens) or villain (the reds); Martin Lake’s background growing up with his insect-catching father and, if we can believe one historian, his folk-artist mother with a fondness for mysticism; Martin’s friendships with a circle of cutting-edge artists; and, most dramatically, Martin Lake’s receipt of a mysterious letter from an anonymous sender, perhaps a patron.
What happens when Martin Lake, in an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery, weirdness and the grotesque, ventures into the religious quarter to meet his anonymous patron moves the register of the tale into the horrific—in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The shaken artist arrives at the designated address: “Lake turned toward the front door and the person who had opened it—a butler, he presumed—only to find himself confronted by a man with a stork head. The red-ringed eyes, the cruel beak, the dull white of the feathered face merged with a startling pale neck atop a gaunt body clothed in a black-and-white suit.” Dark and foreboding.
The events in Martin Lake's life raise questions about the place of trauma and what it takes for an artist to transform into greatness. For any reader—especially those with a keen interest in the arts—The Transformation of Martin Lake is a gem.
American author Jeff VanderMeer, born 1968
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