The beloved author of Holes presents his first adult novel, a modern fantasy classic of forbidden love, a crumbling kingdom, and the unexpected magic all around us.

Long ago and far away (and somewhere south of France) lies the kingdom of Esquaveta. There, Princess Tullia is in nearly as much peril as her struggling kingdom. Esquaveta desperately needs to forge an alliance, and to that end, Tullia’s father has arranged a marriage between her and an odious prince. However, one month before the “wedding of the century,” Tullia falls in love with a lowly apprentice scribe.

The king turns to Anatole, his much-maligned magician. Eighteen years earlier, when Anatole first came to the castle, he was regarded as something of a prodigy. But after a long series of failures—the latest being an attempt to transform sand into gold—he has become the object of contempt and ridicule. The only one who still believes in him is the princess.

When the king orders Anatole to brew a potion that will ensure Tullia agrees to the wedding, Anatole is faced with an impossible choice. With one chance to save the marriage, the kingdom, and, of most importance to him, his reputation, will he betray the princess—or risk ruin?

This book practically leapt into my hands off the shelves of Waterstones.

Having read Louis Sachar’s Holes its sequel Small Steps and the touching school story There’s a boy in the girl’s Bathroom I was keen to see what his somewhat whimsical approach to narrative and plotting would make of more (allegedly) grown-up fiction with a debut adult fantasy novel.

The luscious cover and gorgeous sprayed edges (spreadges) also worked their magic making me feel almost like a book-tocker as I took it to the cash desk. The idea of ‘book as artefact’ seems to have reached its modern-day apotheosis in this era of beautifully decorated hard-back books. They carry something of the art-meets-literature feeling that must have imbued the scriptoriums of medieval monasteries as monks toiled over illuminated manuscripts.

Having worked in education I have long believed that children’s books don’t have to be childish and the three examples of Louis Sachar’s work certainly avoided the pitfall of talking down to children. They were well crafted, complex, nuanced and entertaining – albeit Holes had some very fantastical elements.

In Holes, where two stories spanning different timelines were braided together. There was that of the contemporary ‘chain-ganged’ adolescent unfairly incarcerated, and that of the over a century earlier female outlaw whose mythic stash of treasure is the reason the prisoners are set to digging the eponymous holes.

In The Magician of Tiger Castle the story again spans the centuries with our first person narrator the great Magician Anatole somehow visiting in modern times, the castle of his middle age and telling us the story of what happened back in the 1520s.

Sachar, in his acknowledgments is quick to point out a respect for historians and mention the sources of information and lectures that have informed this book. There is, for example, an intriguing detail about the Guttenberg printing press – which was more technological evolution than revolution. Printing presses had existed but printed whole pages at once from single block woodcuts, whereas guttenberg had individual metal letters that could be rearranged in frames to greatly increase the versatility of an existing method.

However, like William Goldman in The Princess Bride and Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda, he takes some liberties with central European geography, squeezing a couple of extra countries into the already crowded space at the top of Italy’s boot. In 1523 Anatole was employed as court Magician to the king of Esquevata, whose only daughter Princess Tullia has been betrothed to prince Dalrympl of the neighbouring rival nation of Oxatania since she was three. As the time of the wedding approaches disaster strikes when Tullia now a feisty teenager professes she has fallen in love with the lowly apprentice of the court scribe.

The engine of the plot is then how Anatole – who works in potions not spells – can extricate them all from the diplomatic and personal crises that threaten to engulf all and sundry.

Anatole makes an entertaining and self-effacing tour guide both through the castle itself, and the narrative of entanglement between Tullia and the scribe Pito. The echoes of The Princess Bride persist in the refreshing simplicity of the characters. Prince Dalrympl is a narcissistic bully right up there with Prince Humperdinck and even Shrek’s Lord Farquaad. Tullia, with her mismatched eyes – one brown, one blue – is a charmingly feisty princess, doing what a princess does, sometimes at the point of a jewelled dagger. Pito, with his elegant scribing and exceptionally wide knowledge makes a suitable intellectual foil to Magician and Princess – battling more with wits than with Wesley’s rapier. And the three of them clash minds over 1520s chess – where the queen has only recently had its powers enhanced to move any distance, rather than a measly one square range it had heretofore shared with its spouse. A somewhat prescient development given the wide-ranging path Tullia sweeps through proceedings.

Anatole is perhaps a bachelor version of Billy Crystal’s miracle max, but with less mania, more deliberation, a greater love of tea, and a lot less hair. In fact – by an unfortunate magical accident – Anatole is entirely hairless. This would be a problem on hot days what with eyebrows being so essential as gutters to keep perspiration out of the eyes, except that the same accident has left Anatole unable to perspire. I did chuckle at that, wondering if Sachar were having a poke at any particular public figure, though – in deference to science, Sachar’s Anatole points out that being unable to sweat does lead to a risk of over-heating when exerting oneself. I noticed another potential jibe when the villain gets control of the seat of government of Esquevata and immediately redecorates it, replacing the tasteful restraint of its previous décor with ostentatious displays of gaudy gold trimmings and personal portraits.

This was too exquisite a product to risk dog-earing pages or scribbling pencil annotations to highlight passages and quotes. However, the prose is smooth and the short chapters ensure that even the details of Anatole’s potion preparations clip along at a decent pace. The plot maintains a sense of foreboding pretty much from the off and there is a pretty constant tension of ‘how will they get out of that’. As with all good plans, Anatole’s rarely go exactly as intended and he is at times an – if not exactly unreliable, then unobservant narrator.

For some reviewers, Tullia and Pito appear to be the real protagonists of the story – in the sense that they appear to have the most at stake in the unfolding events. And conventional writing advice is that one should write from the point of view of the character(s) with most at win or lose.  Anatole is a participating observer in Tullia and Pito’s story and for some readers there might be a hunger to be seeing events from inside the lovers’ heads. That said, conventional writing advice is to be ignored by those writers who understand both it and what they are trying to do. For example, The Great Gatsby is the story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan’s love and tribulations told entirely from the point of view (and first person point of view at that) of their observer and enabler Nick Carraway. Sachar makes good use of the opportunities of Anatole’s observer point of view to tease the reader and make them work a little to decipher the lovers thoughts from just their words and actions. And besides, Anatole is an entertaining storyteller with some serious worries of us own – far more pressing than Nick Carraways! Do things end better for Pito and Tullia than poor Gatsby and Daisy? Well – you’ll have to read the book to find out!

Personally I would categorise it more as Young-Adult and cozy fantasy, rather than say grimdark and gritty. But a fun read very much of the quality and entertainment value I had hoped for.

Theo’s special edition of The Magician of Tiger Castle is available now in Waterstones, or you can pick up the regular edition on Bookshop.org