Of relating and narrating

Clare Azzopardi’s Castillo is as complex as each individual reader may make of a writerly novel. Not only its themes, but also plot lines sometimes overlap in a way that might make it appear fragmentary to some, but amazingly skilful to others. It may be approached from various angles – its plot’s schema, its psychological portrayal and relationships, of mainly familial characters, its study of motherhood, the correlation between Cathy’s stories and the background and timespan the novel is set in, etc.

I am mainly interested in its technique, which knits all aspects together to suggest interpretations mainly unstated, but implied by structure and other authorial ploys. The plot itself can be summed up relatively simply – abandoned at seven years old, Amanda seeks and finds her mother, Emma, after 25 years, only to be told by her that she has killed two men. Emma relates how one is a neighbour’s husband, Tommy, for whose murder she hired a hitman, convinced (though apparently without proof) that he was behind a car bomb which blew up her twin sister, Cathy, an author. The other is a character in one of her sister’s stories, Castillo. Emma is then murdered herself after she abandons her daughter yet again. Amanda listens to what Cathy’s companion, Anne, relates about the twins’ shaky relationship and both discuss Cathy’s books. At the end of the novel, Amanda is exclusively concerned with the nature of her own motherhood.

Events in the novel’s political background are immediately recognisable as Malta’s in the 1980s − Gaddafi’s visit and an actual fatal bombing, for example. However, the text also employs names which are associated with public figures at the time, despite the novel’s characters themselves bearing no relation to the historical ones (except for a dog). Gaddafi appears in photos of characters in the stories (both those narrated by Amanda and those written by Cathy), in more sophisticated links this time, than was that of the acronym, pdm, employed in Kulhadd halla isem warajh, Clare Azzopardi’s previous publication for adults.

Of more portent are the links between descriptions of keys, front doors, dialogue patterns at doors opened from within, and difficulty of getting beyond doors into the interior. Characters are associated with their houses and Amanda’s visits to them take the form of a pilgrimage towards finding out the truth about members of her family, or her own identity. Moreover, most houses, including the one she initially lives in with her father, are described as dark, silent, mouldy, smelly, void, almost gravelike, so that, more than once, Amanda describes her narrative as one “to fill the void”, which the toddler, Klarissa, when referring to her dead grandmother and aunt, terms Bahh, a word used by children to signify emptiness or nothingness.

This would be only symbolic, if factors didn’t exist to suggest that Amanda, as narrator, is not entirely reliable. Of course, when it comes to relating what has been related to them, first-person narrators can never be totally reliable, considering that both listeners and readers tend to understand, interpret, evaluate what they hear, according to their own perspectives. In a writerly novel, as opposed to a readerly one, there is no omniscient author with a predetermined plot, to tell readers what to think. In Castillo, the presence of Cathy’s stories “without beginnings or ends” remind us that fiction differs from “lies” or even “untruths”. As the quote of Handke, which heads the book, reminds us, fact is often embellished by a fiction created by our own perspectives, but nevertheless believed.

Cathy’s murderers, with the exception of Samantha, are never disclosed. But what is related in Cathy’s fiction seems, to me, far more concrete than most of what happens in Amanda’s narrative. She herself uses the term “surreal” when she first meets Emma and, later, refers to her own accounts as having no beginnings or end either. What comes closer, for example, to a credible decription of violence? Is it Emma’s vague relation of Tommy’s death, or the even more indistinct one of Castillo? The brutal beating and murder of the Tonna Brothers strikes me as far more convincing, though purportedly belonging to Cathy’s fiction rather Amanda’s narrative. I believe there is enough referred to, or even quoted, in the novel, to suggest that Amanda’s meeting with Emma is, possibly, only imagined by the former as the wishfulfillment of a longing that could not be appeased in 25 years. Perhaps all Emma did was die a natural death when Amanda was only seven, leaving her daughter bewildered and confused. Both her and our perplexity is hardly addressed by Amanda’s father, Robert. Moreover, in Maltese, telqet means she’s left but is also a euphemism, like she’s passed away. Maybe, Amanda narrates to us what she imagines has been related to her by Emma – it is not the same thing. At the very start of the book, Amanda says she loved imagining things about people. The book can be read at the level of an entertaining story, but I believe there is so much in Castillo which is open to interpretation, open to the interaction of the novel itself with involved readers, that its complexity has added considerably to my considering it one of the most challenging and enjoyable novels I’ve read in a long time. That it is written in Maltese, and by a woman with such a masterly (mistressly) wielding of language, makes it even more delightful.