The House of Barbary
Bern, 1653: Beatrice Barbary apparently buries her murdered father, joint mayor of the city, with all the great and the good in attendance. A widower, he had both encouraged his daughter in her talent for science but also zealously prevented her going into the world, to the extent that as a child she socialised only with adults visiting the labyrinth of the Barbary ancestral home. While she resembles the mother she never knew and whose clothes she wears, the girl’s pale face and hair seem as much the result of her sequestered, almost sunless life as her genetic inheritance, in a Bern that outside the walls of the Barbary house teems with sound, activity and the vividness of life both prosperous and cruel.
Beatrice fantasises about ‘laying out her father’s murderer on her dissecting table, making a clean cut down the centre of his front, pulling aside the skin.’ But was Jakob Barbary an enlightened, affectionate father, a coercive controller, both – or something even worse? And how did the macabre contents of the cellar come to be there, deprived even of their names? A horrifying discovery made by a young artist residing in the house while he paints portraits of Jakob and his circle of friends, members of the mysterious ‘Order of St Eve’, ultimately unleashes in Beatrice the violence nestling just below the surface of her psyche, a craving to administer a justice that otherwise will not be delivered.
This carefully plotted novel is told in two timelines mainly from the point of view of the child Beatrice, the bereaved adult woman and the craven, hapless artist. It is inspired distantly by the Bluebeard legend, but ‘outcreeps’ Angela Carter’s retelling of that famous myth. One of the most original books I have read in a long time.
