The American author Louis Sachar’s most celebrated book, 1998’s YA novel Holes, was a huge word-of-mouth success on both sides of the Atlantic. Its short, punchy chapters tell the story of plump, hapless Stanley Yelnats, sent to a summer camp for wayward boys, where a terrifying Warden has peculiar ideas about character reformation. The 5ft-deep holes the boys are required to dig turn out to have a surprising purpose. Shifts of time, register and perspective render a simple premise mesmerisingly intricate. It has peril, love, crime, wickedness, redemption and friendship in, well, spades.
A quarter of a century later, Sachar has written his first supposedly adult novel, in which many of the same ingredients reappear. A man “dressed like a typical American tourist”, but with an odd habit of storing cake crumbs in the pocket of his hoodie, has arrived at the castle of the title, filled with curiosity to see how much has changed in the past 500 years. He seems to know intimate details about daily life back then in the court of King Sandro, Queen Corinna and the headstrong teenage princess, Tullia. Anatole, the king’s bumbling magician and alchemist, was fast losing prestige due to his abject failure to turn black sand, brought in from Iceland at huge expense, into gold. But the magician evidently achieved one stunning success, for Anatole is our present-day narrator. Grisly legends have built up around the castle, as eagerly related by the tour guide, but are full of errors. Anatole decides to recount the real story.
