Book review: The Claimant

Janette Turner Hospital's characters are compelling and there's a pleasing moral complexity to the situations she creates. Photo / Jason Ayer

The latest epic from Janette Turner Hospital's latest epic is not historical fiction, but it has a basis in history. It began when she attended a presentation on what was once widely known as the Tichborne Affair, where the heir to one of England's great estates, missing and presumed dead for decades, seemed to have resurfaced to lay claim to his legacy. Debate over whether the young man really was Roger Tichborne raged in 19th century England and Australia (where the man purporting to be the heir to the Tichborne fortune was living and working as a butcher), even as the case crawled its way through the English courts.

What, Hospital asked herself, would it be like if a similar story unfolded today, in the age of avatars and sophisticated identity theft?

The Claimant sets out to find that out, using four main characters, each of whom is adept at creating and recreating their own identities. The opening voice is that of "Marlowe", a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme architect who doubles as a CIA informant. He introduces us to the story: a man has been located in rural Queensland who just might be Gwynne de la Valliere Vanderbilt, heir to a substantial portion of the fortune of one of America's richest families. The notion is being tested in court, even though the butcher boy from Australia himself has never claimed to be Vanderbilt, let alone the fabulous wealth.

Marlowe reckons he remembers Vanderbilt when he was Patrick McVie, a fellow student at Harvard, and they both used to hang out with Lilith Jardine, whose association with McVie/Vanderbilt, Marlowe suspects, ran deep. Through his connections, he also happens to know that although Lilith is an art appraiser for Sotheby's, she moonlights as a member of an organisation dedicated to bringing to light the crimes against humanity committed by the world's many repressive regimes, and assisting their victims.

And Marlowe is married to Celise Vanderbilt nee Boykin, who has a material interest in the authenticity or otherwise of "the claimant", as the tabloids have taken to calling him. As the quality of his marriage deteriorates, Marlowe is moved to do a bit of digging into Celise's past, and discovers that she too is not who she says she is.

If you think the story sounds convoluted, you'd be right. The narrative is shared across Marlowe, Vanderbilt and Lilith's voices, and sprawls from contemporary United States backwards to wartime France and forwards to contemporary Australia. And since, in the French phase, everyone seems to have the same name - Grand Loup and Petit Loup, Grand Christophe and Petit Christophe - it's possible to get quite lost at times. This is quite deliberate: the muddle is laid out in all its baffling complexity at the outset, and the remainder of the book unravels it for us.

Hospital manages it all very adroitly. Her characters are mostly compelling (Celise is a caricature of the gold-digging vixen, and Marlowe serves more as a plot device than a character), and there's a pleasing moral complexity to the situations she creates. You know you've started caring for Lilith and for Ti-Loup (aka Petit-Loup, aka Gwynne Vanderbilt, aka Pat McVie) as you begin to fear that the author has a bad end in store for them. And you know you've been in the thrall of a master storyteller when you reach the (rather abrupt) ending with a real sense of loss.

The Claimant
by Janette Turner Hospital
(HarperCollins $34.99)

John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.