Meaghan Delahunt

In the Blue House (2001), Meaghan Delahunt's debut – also published in the United States as In the Casa Azul: A Novel of Revolution and Betrayal – is a meticulous reconstruction of the tragic fall of the Soviet Union from its utopian ideals through the eyes of its chief protagonists, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. The narrative begins with Trotsky and his wife Natalia arriving in Mexico after years of exile spent roaming around Europe. They have been invited by Diego Rivera, the renowned muralist and fellow traveller. He initially installs the couple at his home, the Casa Azul. While Rivera's guest, Trotsky begins a short-lived affair with Frieda Kahlo, Rivera's wife, and an equally renowned artist. The rest of the novel is a series of shifting panels, cutting back and forth in terms of both characters and chronology. We are slowly introduced to Nadezhda, Stalin's second wife, who later commits suicide, the poet Mayakovsky, also a suicide, Trotsky's assassin, Ramon, who at Stalin's bequest murders the former architect of the Russian Revolution with a pickaxe in 1940. Part romance and political biography, the novel has shades of Delahunt's former life as a political activist in her native Australia; once a firebrand – who dropped out of university at the behest of her local party – Delahunt worked as a spokesperson for workers at General Motors, a cause to which she dedicated eight years of her life. Relocating to Edinburgh 17 years ago, Delahunt began to write, devolving several years of research to this work – a fact which, as far as some reviewers were concerned, led to some of its greatest flaws. The novel was heavily criticised in the press for its cumbersome and often overbearing use of historical detail – as well as its melodramatic dialogue. Julie Myerson said that it plainly suffered from 'staged memories and forced flashbacks' and its 'touchy-feely phrases' (The Guardian, 21 April 2001). Nevertheless, In the Blue House was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

While the search for political and idealistic purity is at the heart of In the Blue House, the focus shifts to spirituality for her follow-up, The Red Book (2008). The prologue hints at Delahunt's attempt to make this a very visual work:

'She chooses the photographs, places them in an album and binds them in red fabric. The photographs speak of India, of different people and places; they span continents and time. To touch an album is to put it back into motion; to turn the pages is an ongoing story.'

The picture which sets this story in motion is by Raghu Rai, the photographer who made his shot of a dead child's head half-submerged in dirt the iconic emblem of the Bhopal disaster – the gas spill at the Union Carbide factory that killed thousands of people in 1984. Thus, Delahunt constructs yet another complex narrative out of three chief protagonists: Françoise, an Australian photographer, Arkay, an alcoholic Scottish tourist turned Buddhist monk and Naga, who is Tibetan (and like Arkay is also a monk), a refugee turned house boy, who, while serving a family of Sikhs in Delhi – and saving their lives in the riots that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards – also loses his family to the gas leak. The initial setting is a Delhi boarding house owned by Surjit, a dispossessed member of the Punjabi aristocracy who lost his fortune during Partition. The repartee he has with Françoise towards the beginning of her stay is particularly poignant:

'I listened and nodded, but something in my face made Surjit sit up. He turned to me. "This may seem strange to you, I know."
I smiled and shrugged. "Well – where I come from, we don't have servants."
"But you used to!" he said, as his hands thumped the table.
"Your culture lost the art,"
I couldn't resist. "That was never my culture…"
"Oh?" said Surjit. "And in Australia? What was your culture?"
He was amused. "What line was your father in?"
"Post Office."
"Director?" he asked.
"Delivery."
Surjit sat back and smiled. I could see that my answer pleased him enormously. "Oh." he said. "After Lahore, I was in tea."'

Surjit later berates Françoise for being the 'typical' foreigner, the sort who only go to India in order to gloss over its disasters and fall in love with a monk. Considering Françoise wants to work in a project in Bhopal and later falls for Arkay, the monk, this is not far off the mark. Weaving together Indian politics, ethnic rivalries and, as always, well-researched glimpses into the lives of monks and the differences between the numerous castes around the sub-Continent, The Red Book is a far less convoluted affair than its predecessor. Its scope is more modest, its progression more leisurely, its characters less diffuse and scattered. In her review of the book, Kamila Shamsie praised its 'rich material', (The Guardian, 12 April 2008), and rightly highlighted the novel's chief strength: the depiction of Arkay's struggle to replace alcohol with a more meaningful stimulant: self-awareness. Unlike Françoise or Naga, Arkay's lines are short, witty, knife-edged and – more importantly – real. Ashley Tellis, however, criticised The Red Book for its 'exotic stereotypes' and its 'endless assemblages of local Indian colour…gas victims dying, hijras, Indian trains, the weather …' (The Hindu, 19 June 2010).

Delahunt's second novel was short-listed for various prizes, including the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Clare Maclean Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Delahunt's third novel, To The Island, was published by Granta in 2011. It is set in present-day Greece and features a woman in search for her father, alongside the backdrop of the complicated legacy of Greece's rule by a military junta in the 1970s. The novel is reputedly inspired by a year-long stay the author had in the country nearly a decade ago. Delahunt currently teaches fiction at the University of St Andrews.

André Naffis-Sahely, 2010