This novel is set in the author's native Albania, in its bleak and fierce High Plateau. In the early 20th century the writ of central government does not run up there, and the mountain communities live by their own centuries-old law, the Kanun, which regulates every aspect of their lives. In particular, this code regulates and indeed insists upon blood-feuds. Every killing must be avenged, and that includes the killing of the avenger. Once an extended family is drawn into such a feud, therefore, honour demands that there is effectively no end to it. A killer is safe only during the bessa, the period of one month following a killing. When the bessa has expired, he is doomed. He even has to wear a black ribbon on his sleeve to show the rest of the world that his life is forfeit. Only by immuring himself for the rest of his life in one of the dark towers (or kullas) dotted over the landscape, could he escape. The novel begins with the story of Gjorg, who has been forced to avenge his brother's death, and who now cannot expect to live through the whole of the month of April.
Into this world intrudes a newly-married couple from the city, Bessian and Diana. Bessian has written extensively about the Kanun, and his idea of a honeymoon is to take his young wife to the High Plateau to show her something of the life that has obsessed him for so long.
It seems to me that Bessian and Diana represent two sides of the author himself. Bessian is fascinated by the majestic primitivity of the mountain people; he finds a rationale in the blood-feud enjoined by the Kanun, and, because so many people are involved with it, he sees fatalist acceptance frequent early and sudden deaths giving a kind of intensity to life. In some of his other powerful novels (The File on H, The Three-Arched Bridge, The General of the Dead Army), Kadare shows a similar Romantic fascination with a society of Noble Savages - savage, it need hardly be said, in a violent sense that is a million miles away from their peaceful Rousseauesque prototypes! Only the laws of hospitality redeem this society somewhat, though even here the Kanun seems positively to glory in its extremism and irrationality. Then, in Diana, Kadare shows, I suspect, the other side of his personality: perhaps some sense of guilt about this very fascination. In his treatment of Diana, Kadare is still a Romantic: she cannot or will not find the words with which to confront her husband's obsession. But her muteness conveys better (and more artistically) her sense of horror than any more articulate and rational exposition of it could do.
The whole book is a work of artistry: the chilling, rain-soaked and largely featureless uplands, the dour mountain folk who inhabit them, the intricacy and implacability of the Kanun are all brilliantly described.
