Plugging In the Literary Devices

THE THIRTEENTH TALE

By Diane Setterfield

Atria. 406 pp. $26

If you are a Reader with a capital R, as is the narrator of Diane Setterfield's debut novel, the pages of "The Thirteenth Tale" will remind you of what you know and love: the world of books. What you are less likely to recall, however, is the world outside them, the world we inhabit when we set our books aside. Setterfield's erudite novel amounts to a sort of brainteaser, a literary riddle to occupy the mind rather than a new vision to inform it.

The novel's references are to Bronte and Dickens, but in many ways "The Thirteenth Tale" has more in common with the work of Brown -- Dan Brown. Short chapters that leave us dangling off cliffs; historic locales protecting secrets in the walls (or attics, libraries and gardens); a bookish protagonist with a knack for cracking codes; a roster of eccentric players appearing and disappearing as the plot requires -- these are the devices that buoy "The Da Vinci Code," and they serve again to carry us through Setterfield's Gothic mystery.

Set in present-day England, the novel opens as the narrator, Margaret Lea, returns one night to her apartment above her father's antiquarian bookshop. On the steps she finds a letter from one of England's most celebrated living novelists, Vida Winter. The letter takes Margaret by surprise, but not so much as one might expect. Margaret, a self-made scholar whose academy is her father's inventory and clientele, has recently published a biography of a little-known pair of literary brothers. Miss Winter, having read her work, proposes to offer Margaret a subject of far greater renown: herself.

The problem, though, is that Miss Winter has written more than 50 novels in the course of her long career, with millions upon millions of copies sold, yet Margaret has not read a single one. What's worse, Miss Winter is famously deceitful when it comes to the details of her background, having offered countless contradictory fables to reporters through the years. Margaret considers declining the invitation, but after she borrows one of Miss Winter's books from her father's collection -- called "Thirteen Tales," but containing only 12 -- she can't resist.

Not surprisingly, there is more to the connection between biographer and subject than meets the eye. As we learn early on, Margaret was born a conjoined twin but lost her sister in infancy when surgeons separated the two girls (a fact her parents hid from her for many years). Miss Winter, too, understands the bond of twins, the trials of separation and the weight of family secrets, though the details of her tale prove more complex. Only with Margaret's help will she undertake to tell it, and they must work quickly, for the elder woman is gravely ill. For weeks, the two sit together as the enigmatic Miss Winter weaves her final yarn, recounting the story of her childhood home, the now-decrepit Angelfield (which Margaret visits more than once) and the ill-fated characters who have lived and died there. Part family drama, part detective story, part bildungsroman, part romance, part ghost story, part novel of manners, part epistolary, Miss Winter's life story is all the books that Margaret loves rolled into one, though to what end is hard to say.

Margaret eventually finds herself exhausted by her charge -- listening, transcribing, sneaking, spying. She is unaccustomed to the sorts of dramas that play out in the flesh, rather than on the page. She longs for "a story where everything had been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle was invented only for my enjoyment, and where I could measure how far away the solution was by feeling the thickness of pages still to come." For better or worse, "The Thirteenth Tale" fits this description perfectly.

Setterfield, a former professor of 20th-century French literature, is a deft stylist and talented technician. Both her love for literature and the depth of her learning enliven her debut novel. "The Thirteenth Tale" keeps us reading for its nimble cadences and atmospheric locales, as well as for its puzzles, the pieces of which, for the most part, fall into place just as we discover where the holes are. And yet, for all its successes -- and perhaps because of them -- on the whole the book feels unadventurous, content to rehash literary formulas rather than reimagine them.