After publishing seven books for young adults, Bridget Collins’s first for adult-adults – The Binding – became a break-out bestseller last year. Now comes The Betrayals, another sumptuous act of imaginative world-building that looks set to prove similarly, well, spellbinding.
If you’re looking for an absorbing, transporting work of fiction – and why would you not be? – The Betrayals is just the thing. It’s set in an unnamed European country in the 1930s, in an elite, remote university named Montverre, which is dedicated to the study of the mysterious grand jeu – a subtle game bringing together elements of music, mathematics and meditation, in order to allow “communion with the divine”. Collins was inspired by the Glass Bead Game of Hermann Hesse’s novel, and her descriptions of the grand jeu remain equally enticing and elusive.
Léo, a former scholar, is sent back to Montverre after losing his job as culture minister for voicing dissent; his eyes and ears may be useful there. But on his return, this charming, cynical politician is reminded of his youthful passion for the grand jeu, and a painful relationship with another brilliant, arrogant scholar, not least because the only female grand jeu “Magister” at Montverre looks eerily like his old friend and rival.
Collins moves back and forth between Leo’s two encounters addictively, teasingly unpicking her characters’ entanglements and conflicting desires. Ambition and competition, admiration and ego swirl in a heady brew, while the sexual tension simmers until you can practically feel the steam rising from the pages.
The spread of a fictional fascism forms a tense backdrop to Collins’s tale, sharpening the various moral questions facing its characters, and fuelling a – somewhat underdeveloped – shadowy subplot. Not all the intricate twists of the tale quite hold up, with Claire and Léo making choices that stretch credulity, if you think about them too much. It’s best not to: simply settle in, and enjoy getting lost in this captivating book.
• The Betrayals by Bridget Collins is published by the Borough Press (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
