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Her private life takes a fillip when Nick, playing Ferdinand, takes a shine to her. When it is revealed that he is the son of a theatrical agent who also happens to be the bosom friend of her father, you know you're in for a deal of skeleton rattling. Absurd as all this might seem, Will Eaves steers his gaudy galleon with assurance and flair. Only at the end does it hit the rocks.There's no denying that the various relationships are hard for anyone unbitten by the murder-mystery bug to follow, but for much of the time you are content to be swept along The reason for this lies in the author's prose. It goes without saying that everything is presented with a side order of secrets. Alice, plump and over-aware, should have been an actress. Instead, it is her sharp, knowing younger sister Martha who first attains success on the stage. One evening, while Martha is playing Miranda on the South Bank, an earthquake, the most powerful the capital has known in almost a century, strikes London.
As a symbol for what is to come the earthquake is a fair enough image, though its actual significance is never quite explained. Here is a tale of two sisters, bound by professional envy and sexual jealousy; a father and son who are not quite what they seem; of a brilliant, drunken cabaret artist and his tortured muse; of a mother with two daughters who hate her and one who died young. P? treads a fine line between pretension and profundity, layering his text with many others from the Gospels to Becket and Borges, but his own words, weighed against theirs, are rarely found wanting. However, The Zahir lacks the scandal of Eleven Minutes, the excitement of The Devil and Miss Prym, or the power of The Alchemist, so I wasn't left with quite enough to hold my interest.
I'm always hugely excited about a new Coelho novel, so it's a great shame. >One wintry evening, Vollard the bookseller runs over a 10-year-old girl with his van. The opening section of Pierre P?'s novel follows their next 24 hours, as ?a clings to life. That such a story is not unbearable is due partly to the elegance of P?'s prose (served perfectly by his translator Ina Rilke), but also to the peculiarities of his two adult protagonists, Vollard and ?a's mother, Th?se.The latter, an aimless, depressive drifter, elicits little sympathy.
