Castillo
by Clare Azzopardi
A book review
Following its publication, Clare Azzopardi’s Castillo made the shortlist for the Malta National Book Prize in the novel category. That year, the jury decided not to award the prize, claiming that none of the forty or so competing books made the grade. A good novel, the jury of three noted:
doesn’t contrive characters as plot devices and it does not follow its predecessors with an anxiety of influence; it is new, which means that it is not yet told and it is consistent from the first to last page, and it ultimately should startle the reader.
They went on to state that none of the novels considered for the prize:
leapt out as far from the rest so as to be singularly exceptional even when not in a competitive context. We feel that there is room this year not to reward a novel for being simply ‘better’ than its competitors. As adjudicators, we believe that a novel should earn the National Book Prize when it is distinct not just from its shortlisted peers but from what the Maltese context has come to expect from a novel.
Unsurprisingly, this decision raised a mini-controversy in Maltese literary circles, leading translator Kevin Saliba, a member of the jury, to stick up his middle finger (metaphorically speaking, of course) towards the literary establishment and, particularly, the “sore losers” who had the temerity of blocking him on Facebook:
I will fully defend our decision not to award the prize in this category... get over it. I don’t want to be apologetic... not one novel satisfied our criteria. Not even Castillo... this is no national scandal.”
The fact that Saliba felt that he had to single out Castillo in his statement is significant – Azzopardi’s novel was widely tipped to win and there were some leading figures (such as author Immanuel Mifsud) who seemed to believe, contrary to the jury’s position, that Castillo deserved the prize.
I am just a reader and sometime book-blogger. Evidently, my criteria for judging a book are quite different to the jury’s as I found the novel fresh and very enjoyable. I could not help wondering – perhaps unfairly, perhaps not – whether the snub suffered by Castillo was a result of a fairly common “highbrow” distrust of entertaining genre fiction. In fact, the novel would not be out of place on the crime/mystery shelf in the library because it is, at least at a superficial level, a mystery story, albeit one featuring two investigators.
The first of the novel’s two “detectives” is the narrator, Amanda. Abandoned by her mother Emma who left home during Amanda's childhood, and now herself the mother of a toddler named Klarissa, Amanda decides to trace her mother’s whereabouts and confront her about her family’s past. In particular, Amanda is intrigued by the mysterious figure of her aunt Catherine, also known as Cathy, Kitty or “K. Penza”, the author of a series of detective novels of the 70s and 80s about the novel’s “second” investigator – Inspector Castillo. The elusive Cathy, Emma’s twin, was killed in a bomb attack in the political turmoil of the eighties and her last novel was completed and published by Emma. The author’s death was passed off as accidental, but was likely a result of Cathy venturing into politically sensitive territory in her Castillo novels. Amanda is shocked to learn from her mother that Emma avenged the assassination by killing two men – the presumed killer and Cathy’s creation, Castillo.
Castillo is a meta-detective-story which indulges in some intriguing postmodern playfulness. The present-day narrative, featuring Amanda’s search for the truth about her family, alternates with chapters from the fictional Castillo novels. These segments include intentional clichés gleaned from the detective and the police procedural genres and contain nods to established crime authors. In one of the meta-fictional references in the novel, a disappointed reader writes a letter to Penza complaining that her stories do not respect Father Knox’s Ten Commandments for the writing of crime fiction. Ronald Knox, a writer from the Golden Age of detective fiction, devised a set of rules for aspiring authors of mystery stories. The rules essentially consider a crime novel as a “puzzle” and maintain that the reader should be given a fair opportunity to solve the mystery. Classic whodunnits are a comfort read precisely because whatever heinous crimes lie at the heart of a book, the conundrum is solved at the end, the perpetrator apprehended and the world returned to safe mode.
Not so Castillo. Amanda’s questions are never clearly answered. The novel has a recurring theme of empty, or nearly-empty, houses – Amanda’s (after the death of her father), Emma’s, Cathy’s, that of Cathy’s erstwhile friend/lover Anne. Amanda seeks closure from these hollow spaces, but they yield their secrets begrudgingly, if at all.
Similarly, the Castillo chapters are like tantalising excerpts from longer novels, setting out the mystery but never leading us to the satisfying conclusion which we would expect from a traditional crime novel – certainly not from one respecting Father Knox’s commandments.
Castillo is a multi-layered novel, and one of its most important strands is a “political” one. As the book progresses, the Castillo segments become darker and darker, and the final excerpt (from Penza’s swansong The Brothers Tonna) portrays a harrowing scene of police brutality that is very clearly based on a notorious real-life episode of the eighties. Maltese recent history is still very divisive. Azzopardi suggests that one way of confronting an uncomfortable past is through fiction. At the same time, the lack of a clear “closure” to the Castillo series (with the version published by Emma not reflecting Kitty’s manuscript) expresses pessimism about the possibility of older people ever managing to come to terms with the country’s past. If there is any hope it is in the younger generations represented by Amanda’s daughter Klarissa – untainted by the sins of the past, they can (possibly?) build a brighter future.
Castillo might
have disappointed the Book Prize jury. I
found it to be an intriguing and complex novel which, through a deft sleight
of hand, manages to deliver the thrills of a traditional mystery story whilst breaking
the basic rules of the genre. That’s more than enough for me.
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