FICTION: InheritanceBy Nicholas Shakespeare Harvill Secker, 254pp, £12.99
AS PLOTLINES go, it’s quite far-fetched: a young man, late for the funeral of a beloved schoolteacher, accidentally walks into the wrong chapel and – by a twist of fate and the extraordinary will of the departed stranger – ends up inheriting £17million. Yet the “inheritance” that Nicholas Shakespeare sets out to explore in his latest novel is more than just one of material gain – it asks deeper questions about cultural inheritance and the immigrant experience, and the legacy of damage that parents pass on to their children, in a story that takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through history and across continents.
Andy Larkham, the young man in question, when he comes into his fortune is a disillusioned, penniless editor, working at Carpe Diem, a modest publisher of self-help volumes. At first he struggles with a crisis of conscience about whether to keep the money – especially when he discovers that his benefactor has an attractive and intriguing daughter who has not benefited from the will – but with the legal reassurances of solicitor Godfrey Vamplew and the encouragement of his best friend, Dave, (two of the many entertaining and well-drawn minor characters), he is soon convinced, and ambivalently accepts his fate. After initially following the blueprint for the sudden acquisition of immense wealth (fast car, flash apartment, a year of luxury globe-trotting in the company of women with names like Gabriella and Lenka), Andy finally succumbs to an uneasy curiosity about the man who has afforded him all this – the mysterious Christopher Madigan. Here the story takes a new turn, and the second half of the novel is largely taken up with the sad and convoluted tale of how Madigan – real name Krikor Makertich, an Armenian refugee brought up in Australia – acquired his riches and lost everything else, as told to Andy by Maral, Madigan’s decrepit, gloomy housekeeper.
It would be extremely difficult – certainly in the space granted here – to touch on the many strands of this wide-ranging novel, and it’s debatable whether Shakespeare himself does them all justice as he addresses the central question, “how can I be who I am?” This is the challenge that Madigan faces, as he tries to bury his past while forging a new identity, and Andy too, as wealth outwardly transforms him, leaving his inner life lagging behind. An accomplished and eclectically erudite writer, Shakespeare peppers the story with quotes from Montaigne, explanations of natural phenomena and forgotten, bleak chapters of European history, while occasionally alluding to larger philosophical questions of religion and the notion of innate evil. Again, though, these larger issues are often only touched on fleetingly, leaving the reader more baffled than enlightened.
That said, the novel barrels along, from early 20th-century Turkey to modern-day London, and some of the strongest passages come as Shakespeare describes, in sensory detail, the sights and smells of particular places – from the rain-drenched stucco streets of Holland Park in February to the fiery devastation of a bush fire in Perth (“his way lighted by the glare of the still-burning trees and telegraph poles, and hundreds of sheep lying in smoking piles”). This will come as little surprise to readers of the author’s previous novels, many set in far-flung locations, and his biography of Bruce Chatwin. He also manages to describe, in a few deft strokes, some very poignant scenes – Andy’s bittersweet memories of his feckless father, or the physical sensation he feels when his fiancee announces she’s leaving him (“the sense of something caving in; of his insides – his beams and rafters – crumbling”).
Ultimately, thanks to a certain amount of narrative string-pulling on Shakespeare’s part, this modern-day morality tale comes full circle, as its characters find a kind of peace and its love story is resolved. Believable it is not – but then fairy-tale endings rarely are.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to The Glossmagazine
