It was Susan Hill's mention of Embers - in the early pages of Jacob's Room is Full of Books - which caused me to take down my copy and re-read it, some fourteen years after I first picked it up. I could remember scarcely anything of Sándor Márai's novel except that, yes, it was the cover which drew me to it in the bookshop: something about those 'Manderley again' gates coupled with the gothic overtones of the jacket copy: "as darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, two men sit down to a final dinner together ... "
The castle is "a closed world", home to Henrik - the General - all his life. Now a letter announces a visitor's impending arrival, causing the host to open rooms which have been shrouded for decades, to have fine vintages brought up from the cellar, and to enlist the moral support of his aged nanny Nini. But it is no celebration that evening for which the General and Nini prepare, instead it is a settling of scores, a chance to recount the events of a fateful day forty-one years earlier, when the two men, and the General's wife Krisztina, last met, and life changed for all of them.
As Susan Hill remarks, "there are as many novels about love as there are pebbles on a beach. But how many are there about friendship?", and it is the friendship between Henrik and Konrad, beginning in boyhood, which gives the story its pulse.
From the start it's a book as still and innately powerful as a taut string, and that tension intensifies as the narrative moves from its depiction of the General's early life and of the bond between him and Konrad, forged at military college, through what is effectively a monologue, as once his guest has arrived and dinner has commenced, Henrik seeks to uncover the truth behind the facts of their last encounter.
"Everything that is worth waiting for has its own season and its own logic," says the General. At the end of a long night he has what he sought; at last his wait is over.
Susan Hill reminds us that fourteen or fifteen years ago this was the novel everyone was reading: the 'word of mouth' bestseller. "I pick up Embers to read again," she says, "and, after a few chapters, realise that the same thing could happen to this a second time. It is a beautiful novel."
On both counts she is right.
I am looking forward to the arrival of the SH book. I've never heard of Embers.
Posted by: Nan | 19 October 2017 at 12:14 AM
Jacob's Room has chased me off to read On Beauty by Zadie Smith, lovely how, with reading, one door opens onto another.
Posted by: Claire | 19 October 2017 at 10:37 AM