I love occult-themed novels and novels set in Venice, so it’s amazing I’ve had Amanda Prantera’s The Cabalist (Bloomsbury) kicking about for so long. Prantera is due a renaissance – it happened to the wonderful Deborah Levy so why not her?
Prantera’s writing has a flavour all its own: intellectual, playful and distinctively creepy with its investigations into the darker sides of the psyche. In The Cabalist, Joseph Kestler, the nature of whose life-obsession is only gradually revealed, has returned to Venice to die. Terminally ill, he is seeking a fit custodian for his magical researches, but also fears a final showdown with his magical nemesis, the horrific Catcher. Can Kestler deposit his manuscript in some archive before the Catcher takes advantage of his weakened state to steal and destroy it?
The Catcher’s room overlooks Kestler’s, so the bedevilled occultist can see how he tempts Venice’s wild cat population with bait on hooks let down from his window. But what happens to the poor animals in the darkened room Kestler can’t quite see into? Since our glimpses of the Catcher reveal him to be a child, is Joseph mad and deluded, or has a diminutive demon really taken up residence in the palazzo across the canal?
Like the Catcher with his prey, Prantera taunts us for some time with various interpretations of the events, mostly seen through Kestler’s subjectivity. Can he really control animals via whispered cabalistic formulae? Is he mad, or a true magus? Does the Catcher even exist? Prantera wraps up her elegant entertainment with a brilliant flourish which satisfies even as it hints at the unknowable gap between what we think we know and what we only imagine. The arch, Fay Weldon-ish addresses to the reader, drawing attention to narrative tricks, are the only aspects which date the book slightly (it was published in 1985).
The only other novel of Prantera’s I’ve read is Capri File, another dark tale of an outsider struggling to penetrate Italy’s mysteries. An Englishwoman married to an Italian aristocrat strikes up an epistolary friendship with a rare book dealer in London, while confessing to him her suspicions about a local boy whom she thinks has been murdered. And her estranged husband might have something to do with it…
Also on the shelf is the irresistibly titled Conversations With Lord Byron On Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship’s Death. Missing manuscripts, old libraries, rare books and forbidden knowledge seem to be her themes. She’s well worth a look for connoisseurs of such tales.