Go to the First Chapter of "Andorra"

Go to Chapter One

Adventures in Never-Never Land

The Andorra in which Peter Cameron's new novel is set has little or nothing to do with the tiny principality high in the Pyrenees -- which is surely to the good. The real place is landlocked, its language (Catalan) is obscure, and until recently it was widely known as a destination for bargain-hunting Spanish housewives, who descended upon it by the busload and went home with shopping bags full of appliances. Cameron's Andorra has a seacoast, everybody there seems to speak Jamesian English, and the only shopping mentioned is literary: There is an institution called the Biblioteca, a kind of national book exchange, staffed by experts in book values. You turn in your used books, receive an expert appraisal of their worth, and use this document as scrip with which to pay for items chosen from others' traded-in wares. There is even an appeals process if you feel your stock's been underrated. What a civilized arrangement.

Why Cameron chose to call his fictional country Andorra, then, is a puzzle -- unless it's simply the word's sound. (Wasn't it Auden who, when asked what was the most beautiful phrase in the English language, replied "cellar door"?). But forget about geography. When these Andorrans aren't trading in hardcover futures, they're committing murder and engaging in amorous intrigue, and in addition to its quirky elegance "Andorra" exerts an almost hypnotic fascination.

Its narrator, Alexander Fox, is an American, the former owner of an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco, who has turned up in Andorra in the aftermath of an unspecified tragedy that left his wife and daughter both dead. He chose his destination largely because it has haunted him ever since he read about it in "Crewe's Train," a novel by Rose Macauley (whom, in a whorl within a whorl, the locals accuse of having got the place all wrong because she never visited it; to add one more twist, the publicity material accompanying the book notes that Peter Cameron has never been to Andorra, either).

Fox has hardly unpacked his bags before the locals are taking him up. He meets, first, the Dents, a handsome married couple, both of whom are called "Ricky" (which prompts Fox to call the husband "Mr. Dent"). Soon he is also within the orbit of the Quays of Quayside, a grand old Andorran family, whose matriarch has a penchant for kayaking. One Quay daughter is beautiful and fast; the other, known as Miss Quay, is gawky but not unattractive. One night Fox kisses Miss Quay, but soon he is making love regularly with Ricky Dent. As opposed to Mr. Dent. Which is a distinction to be insisted upon because in due time that male Dent makes a pass at Fox and goes off rebuffed. The female Ricky assures Fox that she doesn't mind, that their marriage is sound. "I love Ricky with all my soul," she protests. "Despite all this."

Meanwhile, male bodies have been found floating in the harbor, and Mr. Dent comes under suspicion of being the murderer. So, for that matter, does Fox -- mostly, it seems, because he is an outsider. Mr. Dent decides not to fight the charge but to leave his wife and hike over the mountains to Barcelona. The abandoned Ricky is crushed. And Fox begins to think about effecting his own escape from Andorra.

What may sound pulpily melodramatic in outline is adroit and disturbing in the telling. If Alexander Fox turns out to be an unreliable narrator, he's reliably unreliable -- you may not be able to count on him for the full truth all at once, but you can at least be sure that he will intrigue and entertain you. He even treats veracity as a philosophical problem. Pressed by Miss Quay to divulge his feelings for her, he resists: "Sometimes . . . people think they can explain themselves to one another by talking. That they can explain their feelings for one another as they happen, almost as they occur. A sort of simultaneous translation of thoughts and feelings; they think that there should be no mystery, that everything between them should be articulated, understood . . . . But your questions scare me, as do my answers; they seem so reductive and final. I a.m. still discovering what I feel for you."

Except for a slight tendency toward precocity, Cameron's prose is admirably supple. I particularly like this description of a windy night: "The trees made a great show of tossing their limbs in the air, like tempestuous, newly beautiful adolescents." And some of Fox's reflections have a gnomic quality that seems very much in keeping with his bookish worldliness. He has an attack of happiness in his hotel room above a plaza -- "site-specific happiness, a happiness that occurs sometimes when I feel I am in the right place at the right time, when the world around me seems so perfect, so artfully poised and displayed, like a boutique window, that I give in to it: I believe in its perfection, and I feel safe and excused, as if the loveliness of the world somehow precludes anything bad that could happen to me. I suppose everyone feels this: I suppose this is why we travel, why we pack trunks and book berths, why we visit cathedrals and castles, why we stand on veldts and lidos, clutching our cameras and Baedekers, assuring ourselves that the certified magnificence of what we see somehow includes or involves us, and we soak it all in, only to have it leak from us as we sleep between freshly laundered hotel sheets."

At the end comes a revelation, which I wouldn't think of giving away. But I will say that it makes sense of the queasiness Cameron has been artfully instilling in the reader up to that carefully staged point. With its literary framing device (the text begins and ends with a line about having read a book about Andorra years ago), its redolences of Kafka and Buzati and Nabokov, and its alluringly revealed intricacies, "Andorra" is the very book I would trade for in the Andorran Biblioteca.

Dennis Drabelle is a Washington writer and editor.