FRANK DELANEY's pro-tagonist in this new novel is Nicholas Newman, a fashionable architect in his late 3Os. Still grieving for his murdered lover, Madeleine Herb stone - she died three years before the story opens - he is spending a short holiday in Switzerland when he encounters a Hungarian couple named Ikar. The wife, Gretta, is youngish and beautiful; the husband, Freddie, is possibly in his 7Os. They show him photographs of a villa they are in the process of renovating, and in one of them he recognises an amethyst carving of the Eiffel Tower, the only one of Madeleine's possessions to be stolen at the time of her death.
That night, in the shower, he discovers rather painfully that someone has substituted acid for his shampoo. The hotel owner is unsympathetic. The next day his credit cards prove to be useless, his bank accounts are mysteriously emptied, and he finds himself suffering a definitive bout of diarrhoea.
Worse is to follow. Back in London he is attacked by two joggers - one of my own great fears in life - more acid is squirted, and he ends up in hospital being attended by nice Nurse Cree.
While recuperating, he is visited by an elderly man called Lukas Waterman, who gives him a file to read. The file contains information about a bizarre experiment carried out by the Nazis during the war, in which they attempted to break down Jewish family relationships by setting the individual members against one another.
Five families were involved, and of course some of the children are still alive. It also appears likely that members of the team who carried out the experiments survive and are still engaged in their evil pursuits. Our hero, by now badly burned and still suffering from the runs, is in some way caught up in the on-going conspiracy, and must find a way out before he is himself destroyed.
This baroque plot is ideally complemented by Mr Delaney's prose style, a rich, plummy mixture, full of curlicues and flourishes, a literary counterpoint to his beautifully modulated tones often to be heard over the air-waves. He uses words like "banally", "friendly", "wavily", and says things like "my mind grinned". The pace is slow and ceremonial, the dialogue arch and old fashioned, the characters rounded, yet never seeming more than characters in a book.
There is a lot of unintentional humour. A number of the set- pieces becoming so camp that one expects a Julian Clary clone to pop out at any moment. And bizarre is the only word for some of the plot devices, none more so than the explanation for Hitler's hatred of the Jewish race: that he was accompanied by a Jewish companion when, as a youth, a mad goat bit off one of his testicles.
Still, one continues reading, for in this case the whole is greater than the parts, and the book, when viewed with the correct amount of amused incredulity, becomes an enjoyable read. To use a food allegory, it is like trying a rich dessert - say, a banoffe or a tiramisu - which one at first finds stodgy but on further eating discovers to be merely full-bodied. The Amethysts is an exotic offering which, read in a leisurely way, will not induce our hero's malady, Montezuma's Revenge, but rather a feeling of wellbeing and a pleasant after-taste.
Vincent Banville is an author and critic
