A CITIZEN OF THE COUNTRY

The conclusion to Smith’s neo-Victorian trilogy (The Vanished Child, 1992; The Knowledge of Water, 1996) is a virtuosic fusion of speculative history, boldly stylized character drawing, and intricately plotted rousing melodrama.

The action takes place in 1911 in Paris and the Flanders countryside (and, briefly, in America). Physician Alexander von Reisden, who heads the underfunded Jouvet medical research institute, is pressured to cure deeply disturbed André du Monde, Count of Montfort and owner of (as well as writer-performer for) the Grand Necropolitan Theater, whose horrific productions seem extrusions of André’s own dark psyche—by the Count’s wealthy stepfather Maurice Cyron, a potential contributor to France’s desired military buildup in anticipation of a forthcoming German invasion. Complicated, n’est-ce pas ? Not really—at least until André’s ambitious production of Citizen Mabet, a Gallic silent film version of Macbeth, encounters various problems, leading its star, André’s wife Sabine (who dabbles in witchcraft and appears to have taken a demon lover), to agree only reluctantly to a scene involving a “working guillotine.” Only a sadist on a par with a very executioner would reveal the subtly enfolded details of Smith’s dazzling plot. Suffice it to say that it involves “the secret of Montfort” (the castle where filming occurs), persistent rumors (spread by Hungarian blackmailer Ferenc Gehazy) that the embattled Reisden (already known to us as a child murderer) may have been a German secret agent, and the multiple tensions that almost destroy Alexander’s happy marriage to the trilogy’s estimable heroine, blind concert pianist Perdita Halley—whose climactic outburst “oh, my goodness, Alexander, orgies and curses? It just isn’t believable” understates the case beautifully. All is unraveled quite logically by the eye-popping resolution, which evokes fond memories of Poe, Agatha Christie, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Polanski’s Chinatown, among other expertly assimilated influences.

Fiction just doesn’t get any more entertaining and satisfying than this. A bloody triumph.