STUMBLESTONE

Clio Gray

(Sparsile, £10.99)

Revenge is a dish served very cold indeed in Booker-nominee Clio Gray’s latest novel, in which a troupe of travelling entertainers is unwittingly swept up in a Balkan feud that could cost them their lives.

It’s 1839, not long after Serbia achieved independence, with “Albania, Croatia and Serbia plaited together like a multi-wound loaf of bread”. The Kunterbunt Trudelnschau troupe, leadership of which has recently passed from the fearsome matriarch Grandmother Pfiffmakler to her grandson Wenzel, has deviated from its usual route so that the old lady can make a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Montenegro. On their way there, the family stumble across the horrifying aftermath of a massacre in an Albanian village. A little girl is the only survivor. Unable to understand her language, the Pfiffmaklers name her Hulde and resolve to take her over the Adriatic and drop her off in one of Italy’s Albanian-speaking communities.

However, there is dissent in their ranks, with some feeling that Hulde is a curse who will divide and destroy them. The girl also seems to have attracted the interest of other parties along their route, and although Wenzel can’t quite piece it all together it’s dawning on him that the facts of the massacre don’t add up. Little do he and his crew suspect that they are unwitting pawns in a scheme beyond their understanding. What they do understand is that they will have to be on their guard at all times.

Although it’s set in 1839, Stumblestone is suffused with a distinctly medieval feel as the Kunterbunt make their way down the coast and across to Italy, engaging with a culture that doesn’t seem to have changed for centuries and rubbing shoulders with merchants, stall-holders, sea-captains and clerics as well as other nomadic players like themselves. Gray’s descriptions of the Mediterranean bustle and “the jigsaw of local lingo” is a delight, as are her depictions of the people they meet along the way. Best of them all is the bumptious, larger-than-life Andreas Zilboorg, “purveyor of all things hedgehoggery”, whose own travelling show is ailing and who is shamelessly trying to schmooze his way into their ranks. A blowhard and chancer who brings nothing but aggravation, he is nevertheless imbued with enough pathos to win us over.

But then Gray has a knack for bringing even the most minor characters to life with ease, like the monk Ettori and the mechanical tinkerer Helmut Knibb, both fully formed within a few pages of their introductions. Some even more marginal characters, glimpsed briefly on a path or a quayside, return for cameos or namechecks later on, adding to the richness of the world the Pfiffmaklers inhabit.

For Wenzel and his crew to really have weight and believability, we need to see them at work, and Gray includes a couple of excellent set-pieces in which the troupe stage outdoor performances, tailoring each show to that night’s audience, improvising in response to the crowd and drawing on all their theatrical tricks to make them work.

Intertwined with, and in stark contrast to, the politics of 19th Century middle-European partisans in which the Kunterbunt have become ensnared, is the journey of Grandmother, who feels unappreciated and pushed aside after 50 years of hard work and decides to set off on a spiritual journey which will take her to places no one, herself included, would have predicted.

Altogether, Gray’s new novel is an immersive adventure anchored in a vividly realised landscape, with life-and-death stakes and vibrantly descriptive writing, which, as the revelations start piling up, has us questioning who the heroes and villains of this story really are.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT