Can a mountain range be a writer's muse? It would seem so. Having broken through into the ranks of the literary super-sellers last year with Labyrinth, a tale of mystery, religious war and personal survival set in the Pyrenees, Kate Mosse is back on location in Sepulchre, with a spell-binding story of envy, love, greed, revenge and the supernatural all set against the same dark, brooding backdrop.
I don't quite know what it is about the Pyrenees that makes them different. Where the Alps or the Rockies are magnificent and mighty, this range is moody and dramatic, brutal and bleak. There is a postcard much sold in the region of the Castello di Peyrepertuse, a ruined Cathar fortress clinging high up to an unforgiving rock face.
It's difficult to understand how one would get up there now, never mind in the 13th Century, and equally bewildering is the idea that anyone would have thought to build a fortress there in the first place - how could you build it in such a harsh landscape, and once done, would you supply it?. But somehow it fits the landscape perfectly, and offers an insight into the bloody history of the land. Anyone resorting to defending their beliefs and their principles in such an outpost must surely have been both desperate and incredibly resourceful.
This may seem like something of a diversion, but the point is that Mosse manages to capture this spirit of mystery, history and danger in both Labyrinth and Sepulchre, even if the latter is set more in the foothills rather than the business end of the mountains.
These characteristics are also on display in the Sepulchre story, which begins with a burial and ends in multiple violent deaths. Sepulchre is set partly in the present day, partly in the 1890s. IN the modern time frame it follows the quest of American writer and academic Meredith Martin - in France principally to conduct research for her biography of Claude Debussy - to trace her own roots, which she believes might lie in a small village called Rennes-Les-Bains, close to Carcassonne in the far south west.
One hundred odd years earlier, 17-year-old Leonie Vernier is making a similar journey from Paris to Rennes-Les-Bains, in her case for a holiday with a recently-widowed aunt, although it is clear that her travelling companion, brother Anatole, is fleeing the capital for a safer harbour after finding unspecified trouble.
Both women soon find legends and mysteries to pique their curiosity, largely based around a deck of tarot cards linked to the Domaine de la Cade, Leonie's aunt's house (a country hotel by the time Meredith arrives), and local folklore that holds that the house harbours an ancient demon, which when released preys on innocent local children.
It becomes clear very quickly that the two women are linked in some way and both their stories accelerate towards dramatic climaxes on All Souls Eve when the worlds of the living and the spirits are in their closest proximity, most notably in the ancient Visigoth sepulchre hidden in the dark woods of the Domaine de la Cade.
At first I felt that Sepulchre was a little slow to warm up, but actually what I had mistaken for a lack of pace in the story I recognised with hindsight to be careful, pain-staking plotting that paid dividends as the book progressed. Suddenly I found msyelf desperate to be alone and with the time and space to read a story that became increasingly engrossing, and which rose to several different dramatic peaks.
Mosse's attention to detail, in the history, the minutiae of daily life, particularly in the nineteenth century, and in terms of her characters is hugely rewarding. The characters are particularly important in a novel that leans so far over the line separating this world from another, and it is critical that the reader can believe in their actions.
In Leonie Vernier she has created a haunting, sympathetic heroine, a character who starts out as an impressionable, naive young girl but grows into a brave and strong young woman, who is determined to defend her family irrespective of the consequences. Meredith Martin is a little more difficult to love, perhaps simply because of her modernity. But nonetheless she is convincing and holds the modern story together very well.
Perhaps the area in which Mosse's great talent shines through best is her handling of the supernatural. It is very easy for a story to get away from a writer when she delves into the unknown like this, but that does not happen here. Mosse creates a deep sense of unease in her plot and its locations, which makes the existence of mostly hidden forces believable, and even a little spine-chilling in places. It is cleverly done and binds the disparate strands of the novel together into a very satisying whole.
A terrific, memorable novel.