I think that most readers of Random will know by now that I am a pretty conventional reader. Crime, biography, history, romance, Victorian literature are all grist to my mill, but my reading of modern novels and literature is pretty poor. The Booker list, the Costa list, any other list which proliferate among the book world, tend to be passed by. I have tried, believe me I have, and I once went through the entire Booker website marking up those titles I had read just to prove it to myself. But it is no good, most of it is not for me and while I freely admit I may be missing out, life is too short and I have reached an age where I now read because I want to and not because the litterati tell me to.
So why all this preamble you may ask. Well, last year I was sent a book by Bloomsbury, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley which, on the face of it, was not my kind of book at all. I freely admit that what caught my eye was the beautiful cover. Yes I am that shallow, but covers will only make you look at a book and open it. Whether you carry on or not is then down to the writer. So I opened and read and loved and I reviewed it here.
And now another one by Natasha Pulley - the Bedlam Stacks. A title to catch the imagination.The story is set in the late 19th century and Bedlam is the name of New Bethlehem, a town in Peru whence our chief protagonist, Merrick Tremayne, badly injured in an earlier foray as an opium smuggler and unsure whether he can manage the journey, is persuaded by his friend Clem to go with him in search of the quineo trees and to bring back cuttings to England for medicinal purposes, ie the making of quinine. The quinine plantations are guarded and controlled by cartels so the travellers pretend they are there in search of coffee though this flimsy premise fools nobody.
The journey is fraught with difficulties all the way but eventually arrive safely and here meet the enigmatic Raphael who acts as their guide:
"He was Indian but from a different nation to Quispe and Hernandez and the boys. He didn't have the Incan nose and his hair was cut short and he was far taller.....he stopped when he saw me, just before reaching his chair. His expression opened as if he knew me, but then he saw he was wrong and sat down"
It seems that Raphael knew Merrick's grandfather on his previous visit but how on earth can he possibly know him when he's not nearly old enough?
Merrick, Clem and Raphael at The Bedlam Stacks, the description of which really captured my imagination:
"Where there had been a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks....I couldn't see the tops of them properly but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs j to a table of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiraling gantries....the light was shining through translucent parts in the stacks which were not rock but glass....when I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but not quickly enough. Where the boom swung into the light the grass sail caught fire......near the wharves the smooth glass turned pebbly and greeny blue shells lay heaped everywhere.... the rocks were all either obsidian entirely or half vitrified, great chunks of glass and rock all twisted together"
I immediately conjured up a picture of these stacks, Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree came to mind which is not so silly as it sounds, you may disagree, and then I imagined a Heath Robinson structure. But that was not good enough, so I then thought of Gustave Dore, again not quite right and then finally thought Arthur Rackham, that is the illustrator who could do this fantastical image justice.
The Bedlam Stacks also features the Markayak statues, worshipped by the locals and which seem to move around though there is a suggestion that when they are visited pressure points on the ground make their movements. Apparently these are not in the author's imagination but are real - they are still dotted around the landscape in Peru but they were treated, historically, as feeling things. They are distinctly creepy and rather scary and they can appear threatening to Merrick.
I kept whipping out my ipad and googling throughout my reading of this book as there was reference throughout to 'string writing' a form of communication used by the people of the Bedlam Stacks to communicate with the Markayak. These strings, called Khipus, are made of a series of cotton or wool strings hanging from a main cord. The colour of the strands used to make the string and the way the strands are twisted together may also be part of the system of storing and relaying information. if you want to read more about this, and I did, then do click on this link to Wikipedia - I find it fascinating.
This is an extraordinary book and one which I find rather difficult to review in a coherent fashion as I find my thoughts keep hopping backwards and forwards to the many strands of the story, all of which are fascinating. However, in the end, it seems to me to come down to friendship and the relationship between Merrick and Raphael, the mysterious priest who vanished for days, months even years at a time and always returns.
Merrick returns to Peru and the Bedlam Stacks many years later when . He receives a letter telling him that Raphael is awakening from a long sleep and returning to the present
"At last they let me go up to his room. It was just the same....I watched the coal burn through a glass window in the front until I saw Raphael shift, as if he had just come out of a daydream, made two cups of coffee .....Raphael looked at me sidelong, starting to smile then stopped. He watched me for almost half a minute......I gave him his cup.
You like it black don't you?
He laughed"
As with the Watchmaker of Filigree Street who, incidentally makes a fleeting appearance in the Bedlam Stacks, it was not until I was almost half way through the book that I realised just how much I was engrossed into the narrative and the story. The mystical, magical setting, the use of Peru as a background, the characters and the idea of the title are, on the face of it, not the kind of story I would seek out. And yet here I am. Writing about it and finding it difficult to put into words what a marvellous book I think this is. The writing is clean, and by that I mean no extraneous adjectives or verbs or flowery phrases, it is to the point, it is elegant and it is a joy to read.
And, once again, the cover is quite beautiful. I was, in the end, enchanted by it.
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