Through a Glass, Darkly by Jostein Gaarder, trans. Elizabeth Rokkan Phoenix House 154pp, £9.99 in UK
It is Christmas and a young Norwegian girl is dying from cancer. Up to her room drift the sounds and smells of the season as her parents, grandparents and younger brother proceed with the usual preparations for celebrating the festival. The adults know of the terminal nature of Cecilia's illness but she herself has not yet come to their degree of understanding, even less of their acceptance, of her condition. The skis and toboggan which she has asked for as presents have been obtained, and her best friend, Marianne, has sent a "magic" butterfly brooch. Gifts are unwrapped, carols sung and Bible stories read. In short, life - if sometimes a little too pointedly - goes on.
And then something miraculous occurs. A figure, dressed in white, appears on the window sill of Cecilia's room, announces that he is Ariel, an angel, and immediately begins to engage the child in animated conversation: life, death and the chain of being which links the two are their principal themes. On Ariel's subsequent visits, as winter gives way to spring and as Cecilia's health deteriorates, the web of philosophical and theological discourse becomes ever wider, its increasing range reflecting the evolution of Cecilia's awareness of her state and of her reactions to her growing knowledge. By the time of his last call, the child's earlier petulance and anger have dissipated and she (and he) are ready to embark on a final flight of discovery.
Gaarder's previous books have taken as their starting point a recognition of the mystery that underlies our existence and a belief in the need to celebrate that mystery rather than allow ourselves to be confounded by it. Here that same celebration is advocated in, paradoxically, a context where at least one existence is sadly curtailed. But the advocacy is, if anything, even more convincing. Cecilia's intellectual sparkle, her Alice-like curiosity and her spirited determination to cling on to an ebbing life are in themselves objects of wonder and beauty - that same beauty which, as Grandma reminds Cecilia in the book's opening pages, is often the source of sadness, simply because we know it will not last for ever.
It would be a pity if a summary such as this were to suggest that Through A Glass, Darkly is either over-sombre or over-sentimental. Such is Gaarder's vision that there is room in his world for, in Derek Mahon's phrase, "everything that is the case imaginatively", an all-embracing perspective that allows for the inclusion of the marvellously conceived and realised Ariel.
To see Ariel merely as the conduit through which Cecilia comes - as does the reader - to perceive something of what may lie behind such abstractions as mortality, or the soul or eternity, is to underplay the richness of his humour. The ease with which Gaarder has always presented complex ideas in accessible terms reaches new levels in this most engagingly colloquial of angels.
The well known phrase which serves as title for Gaarder's book occurs six further times in the text. The repetition is justified and, indeed, necessary, since it emphasises the central theme of human limitation in our attempt to demystify and explain. We have, in Ariel's words, "made the whole world a habit". But in heaven, of course, things are different. "There," says Ariel on another occasion, "we've always known that the creation is a great puzzle and when something is a puzzle you must be allowed to guess a bit too." It is the perfect frame of mind in which to approach a book as stunning, as beautiful and as sad, as this one.
Robert Dunbar's Secret Lands: The World of Patricia Lynch, will be published later this year