Equivocator

Sebastian has long been haunted by the disappearance of his father, Jack Messenger: celebrated travel writer, potential spy and murder victim, his absent presence and equivocal past continue to cast inescapable shadows over his son, who must also contend with his ageing mother’s fragmented memory and his own dereliction of a partner.

So who is the stranger that buttonholes Sebastian at an academic conference on the Welsh coast, and reveals lies and transgressions neither outgrown nor comprehended? How does he know Sebastian, and what are his connections to Jack Messenger?

Equivocator, in a story that stretches from Egypt to Germany, from Iran’s Zagros Mountains to the Gower coastline, is a study of fathers and sons, lovers and betrayers, loss and recovery, and combines dark fable, satire and a love story in its pursuit of the question: can Sebastian find his own salvation, despite the inheritance from his father?

-- Publisher: Parthian Books
Stevie Davies is one of our finest contemporary writers. She has written twelve novels, has been both long- and short-listed for the Orange and Booker Prizes, and has many other awards and prizes to her name. Equivocator is her first novella, and the form is perfect for the intense luminosity of her writing. There is nothing superfluous here and, when you reach the end of the story, you immediately want to go back and start all over again at the beginning. Middle-aged Egyptologist Sebastian Messenger is attending a conference on the Gower when he meets Rhys Salvatore. There is something about the ageing celebrity academic that is familiar to Sebastian, something that makes him think of his father, Jack Messenger, who died a mysterious death close to the Turkish border in Iran when Sebastian was just thirteen years old. Jack’s bones have only recently been found, high in the Zagros Mountains. Jack had a battered leather briefcase that he took everywhere with him. When he was little, Sebastian had used a pin to scratch a picture of mountaineers planting a flag in the leather. It makes the briefcase unmistakeable. Rhys Salvatore has Jack Messenger’s briefcase. Just – Sebastian’s memory slowly clicks in – as he had had it in Manchester in 1986, when Rhys was a visiting academic and Sebastian a student. So who is Rhys Salvatore, and what is his connection with Jack Messenger and his family? Sebastian is on a quest to discover the truth, not only about Rhys and Jack, but also about himself, about why he is as he is. Why does he struggle to commit? Why does he constantly deceive his kind and loyal partner? And where does his mother, Elise, fit into the picture? Elise, a former diplomat, is elderly and living in a home now because her memory is beginning to fail. But she is still a powerful and commanding woman, and she is writing her autobiography, which might hold secrets and truths that Sebastian needs to know in order to make sense of his life – a life in which he is not fully engaged, and which he moves through as if in a trance. The story that Davies weaves here, delicately moving through time as Sebastian gradually puts together the pieces of the jigsaw, is utterly absorbing. Lost memories re-emerge, cherished memories prove to be false, secrets have been kept in order to protect, and some questions simply cannot be broached. ‘The magic is in the quest’ […] ‘to seek out truth in the temple of forgetting.’ Equivocator is quite simply Stevie Davies at her best. -- Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales