Salamander (Paperback)

This aside it is a brilliantly inventive tale switching between our world to one just locked outside reality. This at once makes it endearing and whimsical but with that slightly irritating slant that some fantasy fairy tales possess. It is a tale of two stories that don't quite gel; the Prospero Count in his moving castle protecting his daughter from the printer Flood's passions to the "round the world in eighty days" voyage. The connection between these two halves is valid if not a touch too tenuous and awkward, as one is catapulted into the new plot.

Each character is rounded and the locations wonderfully evoked and as a human tale of lost; love, mother, father, daughter, it's riveting. But for me, the trips into the dips of mystic other worlds should have either been played up or not played at all.

There's a million and one other tributaries to this story just like the infinite book that Flood is charged to deliver. That book must have no beginning and no end, Salamander of course does, and it certainly circumnavigates on the way.

Her grandfather, Count Konstantin was obsessed by riddles and puzzles. Having given up his military career on the death of his son, he set to their pursuit in earnest. His whole castle became an amazing mechanical puzzle and within its walls he collected unique books - often riddles in themselves. One day they happen upon a very intriguing book indeed, the work of one N. Flood of London. Summoning him to his castle in Bohemia, he entrusts him with a very special and challenging task - to create the infinite book with no beginning and no end.

Scarcely has he begun this endeavour, however, than he falls in love with the Count's lovely daughter, Irena. The Count soon finds out and banishes Flood to his dungeons. Flood only escapes following the Count's death when his daughter, Pica comes to rescue him (having herself escaped from the orphanage in which she had been placed). He sets off with her, his printing assistant, and a family of acrobats in the Count's old ship on a voyage around the world in search of this elusive book. But will he at last succeed in this quest, and will he again see his beloved Irena who disappeared shortly after giving birth to Pica?

This is a quite entrancing tale, but I do have a few niggles. In the first place, it is difficult to work out quite how Flood survived his 12 year imprisonment both physically and psychologically given the death of the Count and subsequent fleeing of his staff. Secondly it can feel a little disjointed, and it does seem to lose its momentum once they leave behind the castle walls.

However, these are only little concerns, for in the Salamander, Thomas Wharton has created a magical fairytale for grownups. Told in the third person, it would not have harmed it for it to have begun 'once upon a time'. It is charming and beguiling, beautifully written, laced with much wit and intelligence.