Fruitless family quest

The skeleton key to the treasure that he is trying to uncover is a trunk full of letters and other documents that are as notable in their omissions as in what they reveal.

Author Amin Maalouf's problem is one familiar to anyone who has gone through similar collections of family papers. A writes to B and B replies, but, while we may have B's letter, we can only deduce the content of the original letter from A, since A kept no copy.

It is rather like listening to one side of a telephone conversation.

We know that one of his ancestors emigrated and went to Cuba and that he sent glowing reports to his family about how well he was doing.

We know also that he appealed to his brother to come and help him out of some sort of crisis.

What crisis? The papers don't say. Was he doing well or badly? No definitive answer can be found.

If this were a work of fiction, in due course, the mystery would be unravelled. But here, we never know and we never will.

The confusion is further complicated by the turmoil in the Middle East during the first world war, the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the rise in Turkey of the secularist Kemal Ataturk.

The political figures flit across the background of the story like shadows projected upon a wall and the foreground figures express shifting loyalties in times of shifting powers in an area of the world that is still riven by its history.

But, in the end, as Maalouf returns the reader to where his quest began, with the death of the father whose documents are the raw material for his researches, the end is silence.

KARL DALLAS