The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is subtle and shrewd enough to know that ‘issue books’, which are tracts not works of the imagination, are dull to read and rarely work as fiction should. He presents us with characters who are fully rounded, credible human beings living through moral dilemmas, affected by them, caring about them, living and dying within their context. In other words, he is an intelligent novelist.

But he is also a good storyteller, so this new novel is both stirring and exciting to read, and has a setting which is not ‘background’ but far more: a principal character in the book — in the sense that Thomas Hardy’s landscapes are characters, and shape the lives, thoughts, morals, emotions, beliefs and, as in the case of Arditti’s Philippines, even physique of the people who are born, reared and live within them.