An interview with author Graham Bullen, plus reviews of the latest novels and poetry

It was on a walking holiday to see the volcanos of Sicily that the idea for Highland author Graham Bullen’s third novel – The Puppet Master – erupted.

And he recalls vividly the moment in April 2019 when, with his wife Joanne, they reached the door of their hotel and were struck by the scene that met them. Speaking from his home on the shores of Loch Ness, the River Moriston winding its way at the foot of his garden, Graham, 60, told P.S: “I had already pretty much finished my first book The Quarant when we went on the holiday.

“We sailed to Stromboli and to Lipari, where we were staying. We walked off the boat at Lipari and to the front door of the hotel, and there in front of us was a massive plate glass window behind which was a posed tableau of some original Sicilian puppets. Two-thirds life-size, they were striking.” The following day he asked their tour guide to translate the information panels that accompanied the display and explained the history of the puppets and the characters they represent.

The result, he said, was fascinating.

They featured characters from two famous 15th and 16th Century Italian chivalric poems, Orlando Innamorato (Orlando In Love) by Matteo Maria Boiardo and the saga’s continuation, Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto.

“I thought they dramatised a rich set of stories, and I imagined a family who were a troupe putting on a touring puppet show. I told my wife Jo that I thought it had some legs (for a novel) and I’d think about it when I got home.

“But as we toured around, I paid more attention than I usually do on holiday to the walking guide – who, it transpired, was also a teacher,

historian and film set designer – and I started to pull the story together. The guide and I stayed in touch, and she helped me with a lot of the research.” The Puppet Master opens in 1579 as first-person narrator Nico Cusmano, an old man in ill health, sits in the reception room of his erstwhile estranged younger brother Edo’s Milanese villa. He is about to tell the story of his life, and that of Edo, with the entire Cusmano clan, including Edo’s children and grandchildren, his audience. He will tell of their rise from the humblest of peasant childhoods in the Aeolian Islands to their triumph as the most famous puppeteers and showmen of the Palermo court of the Viceroy.

But his story is also one of brutal family tragedy and madness. It is a tale of blood feuds, jealousies and betrayals, and the looming presence of the Inquisition.

At its heart is the figure of Hadice, a woman loved by both brothers, sitting just feet away from him as he speaks.

But just how much can he trust himself to say?

A sweeping saga, the novel is laced with pathos, humour and an absorbing dose of magical realism while at the same time encompassing the real-life arrival in Sicily of The Inquisition, the invasion and enslavement of Lipari by the Ottoman admiral Heyreddin Barbarossa, and the 1536 eruption of Mount Etna. Graham, 60 – who trained as a chartered librarian, but joined energy company Shell to set up an industrial library in the mid-1980s, latterly working in London for the oil and gas giant as a business improvement coach in Europe, the United States, and Singapore – reveals a chance to take voluntary severance during an oil slump in 2016 gave him the opportunity to try his hand at authorship.

“I left work with no practical writing skills, and I wanted to learn the right way by doing it,” he said. “I gave myself five months working my way through a self-teaching book on how to write and then I went on a creative writing course at the Moniack Mhor.”

The creative writing centre, close to his home, gave him the confidence to self-publish. His first novel The Quarant, came out in 2020, and is set in 14th Century Venice four months before the arrival of the plague known as the Black Death. He said: “I was writing about the plague visiting Venice where 60% of the population died in the year in which it is set. I was writing that as the only traffic that passed me on the road were hearses. We were all in lockdown, it was bizarre.”

His second, The Broch, came out the following year. A contemporary fiction set largely on the Isle of Harris, it follows the heartbreaking story of Martin, newly alcoholic, on a quest to fulfil the promise of a holiday booked weeks before his wife’s sudden death. Graham, “a huge fan of the late Scottish writer Iain Banks” who achieved success in both mainstream literary fiction, and the science fiction books he wrote as Iain M. Banks, said: “i like the idea of flitting between historical and contemporary fiction. It is the most stimulating and enjoyable way of getting two types of writing out of my head at once.”

He added: “They are all just human stories. Whether they are people in 14th Century Venice, 16th Century Sicily or present-day Scotland they are not that many generations apart. It’s all about the humanity and the dramas that come from ordinary people trying to handle ordinary pressures in life and the occasional natural disaster or love affair.”

The Puppet Master launches at Waterstones Inverness on September 19