Seeing things clearly

The hallucination-lade, absinthe-soaked, world of one of the pioneers of photography.
But how much of it is true? By Max ByrdTo write a story, Ray Bradbury used to say, just give a character a compulsion – and then turn him loose. In his first novel, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, Dominic Smith has taken this advice to heart.
His protagonist, the 19th-century Frenchman who was one of the inventors of photography, is driven by two mind-warping obsessions: all his life he has wanted to capture light in permanent form, and all his life he has dreamed of the unattainable Isobel Le Fournier. In 1846, when the novel begins, he is almost 60 and mercury poisoning from his daguerrotype process has added a third compulsion – before the world ends, in one year according to his chemically induced visions, he must photograph and preserve ten items on a personal Doomsday list. The first (this being France) is a naked woman; the last is Isobel.
Readers seeking a factually accurate biographical novel will not find it here: Smith has invented so much that at times Daguerre seems like an imposter in his own life. The historical Daguerre was indeed obsessed by the idea of fixing images through a camera. And Smith is fascinating when he dramatises, in a series of nicely rhythmic flashbacks, Daguerre's apprenticeship to a Parisian stage designer and the remarkable steps by which he discovered how to create a lasting photograph. But Daguerre was also a shrewd entrepreneur, a gifted international showman and a married man who left Paris for the countryside in 1840. No Isobel, no list, no visions.
It isn't clear why Smith would transform this more or less pragmatic businessman into a sensitive and deluded Romantic prophet, but the result, in the first few chapters at least, is highly entertaining. To preserve his photographs against what he sees as the coming Apocalypse, Daguerre seeks out the catacombs beneath the Paris Observatory. He wanders Montmartre. The poet Baudelaire (who actually disdained photography) leads him through an absinthe-soaked, hashishtinted world of grumbling philosophers and good-hearted prostitutes to a nude model named Chloe. And of course she is (as coincidence replaces compulsion) Isobel's daughter.
Smith writes vividly about the Paris Daguerre sees in his hallucinations: “Then the noise of the street bounded towards him, the clop and clatter of the wagons, the shriek of the vendors' cart horses.” He has a talent for descriptive imagery: spilled beads of mercury resemble “tiny planets of glass”; the sun in a daguerreotype “appeared as a ball of pale wax giving off smoke”. And he captures nicely Daguerre's passionate interest in sunlight, whose “secret” was that “it carried images with it. Loosed from the helium roil of the sun, light streamed down and traced everything in its path. . . . Find the right receptor and nature would do the drawing for you.”
But Smith often loses control of his images: “Her eyes floated slowly above her wineglass. Louis thought of two tropical blue fish.” And he relies far too much on mechanical intensifiers of emotion – italicised thoughts, for example, of doubtful profundity. (“Who will eat the last orange on earth?”) At times, straining for portentousness, he overwrites: “If only she could undo time, set things right, reclaim her body before it had become the empty flat where men lodged their desires.”
Daguerre's compulsions never generate much urgency. The Revolution of 1848 is not the Apocalypse. His Doomsday list of photographic subjects is curiously unimaginative (“a perfect apple,” “a flower”) and quickly forgotten. The heroine expires, operatically but not tragically, from “lung fever,” the virus ex machina of melodramatic plots.
Max Byrd's most recent novel is Shooting the Sun
© 2006 The New York Times