‘Call me Marlowe,’ says the first-person narrator of the opening section, Ishmael-like and distantly echoing Heart of Darkness (1899). ‘Or call me Chameleon,’ he adds with the kind of deliberately wicked obfuscation that will be characteristic of the narrative. At a crucial and terrifying point of the story, Cap – who will become Lilith – finds herself, as did Dante, ‘In the middle of a dark wood’, and it is a pivotal moment in ‘the journey’ of her life. Ti-Loup, writing of his last glimpse of Cap, continues the theme: ‘I tried to look back one last time as the doors closed on my second life. All I could think of was Dante passing through the gates of hell.’ Other fleeting but potent references include Comtesse Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt as, on occasion, a Miss Havisham-like figure, and evocative glimpses of great works of art, which inform and amplify the narrative. This is especially the case with the medieval work St Gilles and the Hind, in which Cap sees not only the significance of the wounded St Gilles – who is the patron saint of, among many other afflictions and aspirations, the outcast – but also, in the background of the painting, a recognisable picture of her village, St Gilles, where were sown so many of the seeds of the drama in which she, Ti-Loup, and Marlowe have become enmeshed.

'Quite early in this dense and intricate narrative, you wonder how it is all going to be held together ... Janette Turner Hospital is equal to the challenge: more accurately, she accomplishes it all with an ease that is not only beguiling and attractive, but often almost jaunty.'

In a fascinating Author’s Note, Turner Hospital says, ‘I knew I had zero interest in writing a historical novel … I needed fictional substitutes … [and] a contemporary context.’ She has successfully avoided the inherent limitations of the historical novel and has called upon her impressive imaginative resources and formidable intellectual breadth and flexibility to provide the fiction. Her characters, with their multiple aliases, pursue their complicated and interlocking lives in a world we are familiar with – the world, for example, in which memories of the German occupation of France continued for some time to fuel resentments and vengeance; Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated; and participation in the Vietnam War divided nations and brought down leaders. All of this is familiar, historical indeed. But Cap’s world and Ti-Loup’s, Marlowe’s, the Comtesse’s all exist alongside this real one like a photograph double-exposed, familiar yet teasingly different, another focus, a world within a world. Any number of scenes and moments in this protean story illustrate this, but, to borrow a phrase from one of The Claimant’s narrators, ‘Listen to this’:

La Comtesse stands behind Cap, her hands on the girl’s shoulders. Both woman and child are reflected in the baroque mirror, one of many in the chateau, all the mirrors at least seven feet tall, some of them ten feet, some of them twelve, all of them stretching like pools of light towards a domed or vaulted ceiling, all of them framed in convoluted mouldings of gold. The mirrors telegraph spaces to one another, they commune in a semaphore of arcades, they beckon into rooms that are not there.
There is only one mirror in [her father’s] cottage and Cap has to stand on tiptoes to see herself. The mirror is barely large enough to contain her face. People who live with vast mirrors, Cap thinks, know there are invisible worlds. They understand that they barely know themselves.

The Claimant is a genuine page-turner with perhaps a few too many pages. There is some indulgence. In a novel that clearly involved intense and continuous research, there are occasional descriptions and lengthy asides which, having devoted hours to the search, the author couldn’t bring herself to prune. But if there is some indulgence, there are no longueurs. Turner Hospital is too ebullient and skilled a writer, too full of ideas and sheer story, too intellectually discriminating and exciting to allow what has captivated her to lose any of its verve, fascination, and mystery in the telling.