When the past becomes the present

Right on the money

Inheritance. By Nicholas Shakespeare. Harvill Secker; 272 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE’S new novel, “Inheritance”, begins with a wandering in the wilderness; a four-page piece of bravura writing in which a driven man crosses mountain and desert to peg out an Australian mineral claim that will yield 1,000m tonnes of high-grade iron ore. He calls it Mt Ararat, which should not be forgotten.

“Inheritance” is full of such clues. The miner, son of Australian-Armenians, is a smart if naive boy with an iron will and a heart that is easily broken. By the time he dies he has morphed into a discreet and elegant Englishman by the name of Christopher Madigan. Rich beyond his immigrant parents’ wildest imaginings, Madigan leaves half his fortune to his housekeeper and the other half, randomly at his own request, to the first person who appears at his funeral. Madigan’s estranged daughter, Jeanine, arrives late, to her cost.

This narrative sleight of hand allows for the entry into the story of Andy Larkham, the accidental heir. Like the heroes in Mr Shakespeare’s other novels, Larkham is unsure of himself, stuck in a dead-end job and with a fiancée who is about to ditch him, but at heart he is an intelligent and romantic chap. Madigan’s back story is also the story of Larkham’s maturing as he grapples with the eternal question of who he wants to be while getting used to having £17m in the bank.

In lesser hands this might have been just a cheap literary trick. But Mr Shakespeare (pictured) is a novelist of considerable talent, and his evocation of Krikor Makertich, the grandson of an Armenian woman made pregnant by a man who raped her, and his metamorphosis into Madigan, the English gent, is a study in persuasion and suspense. Thoughtful and beautifully observed, “Inheritance” takes one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century—the Armenians’ history at the hands of the Turks—and explores the gamble that is man’s existence on earth. Never predictable, this novel combines a remarkable narrative force with the lightest of touches. A book to savour and pass on.