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Now, with The Knowledge of Water -- set in Paris during the disastrous flood of 1910 -- Sarah Smith continues Alexander's tale, following her doom-haunted protagonist through the Parisian underworld and art world in a cat-and-mouse game of murder and deception.
Like the tale of The Vanished Child, this new tale begins with a death: a "colorful corpse, still drawing the eye: purple satin skirt spreading around her, red satin jacket, and several waterlogged postcards and parts of postcards, recognizable as Leonardo's painting, still pinned to her clothes. Over her heart her murderer's knife had ripped her jacket to pieces."
The dead woman has been identified as a street beggar who styled herself as "Mona Lisa." Mysteriously, her murderer has written to Alexander asking him to remove the woman's body from the morgue and give it proper burial. Inevitably, Alexander is drawn into the hunt for the mysterious murderer; but complicating the plot are fragments from Alexander's past: Perdita Halley, Alexander's lost love from the previous novel, now in Paris to launch her career as a concert pianist; the witty and spiteful Vicomtesse Dorothea de Gresniere, Alexander's "cousin," troubled by the possibility that one of her prized paintings -- Claude Mallais's "View of the Seine: Twilight" -- might be a forgery; and, perhaps the most complicated fragment of all, the secret of Alexander's real identity.
As the novel unfolds, subtle and rich, one discovers that its underlying theme is not the mystery of murder but the mystery of identity: what is the real, and what is the forgery?
Perdita, the aspiring pianist, has resolved that she will love Alexander and be strong from his strength. But that resolve "was obscurely uncomfortable, like an inexpensive fingering or an interpretation only half worked out." Which part of Perdita is a forgery -- love or art?
In the suspect Mallais painting, the river runs between stone walls, pink with the last light. On the street, a lamplighter, turning on the gaslights while a horse and carriage go by, is busy doing his work and not noticing the glory all around him. Is it truly a Mallais painting, or is it a forgery? And who is the deceptive artist?
And Alexander, trying to explain why he has become the person that he now is, likens his own reality to that of the Mallais painting: "I want to make it at least a good, solid forgery, a compelling forgery, like the Mallais; one that no one will ever spot."
The tangled motives, deceptions, and truths of The Knowledge of Water come together in a stunning climax as the waters of the Seine overwhelm the City of Light and Art.
"Any book is a light shone into a darkness, and we are reaching the limits of the light. Outside it, in the darkness of the century, anything may happen," Sarah Smith wrote in the epilogue to The Vanished Child.
In this marvelous sequel to that memorable first novel, Sarah Smith has accomplished a truly formidable task. With The Knowledge of Water, Smith has given us a new light shone into that darkness where anything may happen.
Robert C. Jones is a freelance writer in Warrensburg, Missouri.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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