Edward Cooper begins life in near-Dickensian circumstances, in a single room on Brunswick Avenue in Depression-era Toronto. Though he and his pretty, unmarried English mother have only each other and a meagre allowance from her estranged family, little Edward is happy. His gentle world is shattered when his mother marries a rich, reptilian piano manufacturer, who takes them to live in England.

Ejected from his mother’s bed, sent off to boarding school and evacuated to Canada during the war, Edward is traumatized and betrayed. He finds solace, then inspiration, in beautiful objects. Perhaps his aesthetic sense has something to do with his father – his mother claims Edward is the result of a shipboard romance with the Prince of Wales.

Edward becomes an art dealer and a collector, and here McLean, herself an artist as well as a critic and a writer, brings palpable authority to the page. Sometimes these passages slow the pace, but they render Edward’s passion for art and objects utterly convincing. Order and beauty sustain him into his late forties, but considering the privations of his early years, it is unsurprising that he is something of a hollow man. On a trip to Sicily he encounters a talented young artist who appears to have stepped out of a Piero della Francesca painting, and all Edward’s careful emotional control gives way.

If this sounds a little like Anita Brookner territory, it is, though the book’s narrative drive is generally stronger and Edward has more spine than most Brookner protagonists. McLean’s characterization of Edward and his hapless mother, Dolly, is solid and deft. This is a finely wrought, mature first novel with some significant things to say about beauty and life.