The respected poet Ruth Padel’s second novel begins in Brexiting Britain, but its heart lies in Crete. Ri, a successful London-based artist, is in the throes of her first gallery show since being widowed when news that her elderly mother is in hospital summons her to Chania. On regaining consciousness, her mother rasps a request for the Jewish liturgical kaddish to be read, something that seems inexplicable, unless Ri’s mother has a hidden past. Through her parents’ wartime recollection, Ri excavates a family history suppressed through fear, learning the tragic fate of Crete’s Jewish community.
Steeped in the history and folklore of Crete, its barren topography, and unyielding vegetation and natives, this immersive novel has tropes familiar from popular fiction — family secrets, flashback, a questing female protagonist, heady foreign setting, romance and wartime heroism — and is told with that sweep. But Padel brings a poet’s eye too. A dawn sky, after rain, “is the shade of untreated wool with seed-pearls of mist . . . Morning is moving through the garden, pure and heavy as gold”.
The Brexit framing, and some of the joins in the modern plotting, feel heavy-handedly didactic. In the historic scenes it is initially confusing that the younger versions of Ri’s parents are identified as Mama and Papa. But still this is transporting, historically informative storytelling.
Daughters of the Labyrinth by Ruth Padel
Corsair £18.99 pp319
