The Blue Book

“Sometimes I suspect that I am, myself, a character in a book,” writes the mysterious narrator of the Blue Book. “How would I know if it were true? When the words are not being read the character lives a strange and conditional existence. No hidden world springs to life when the covers of a book are closed. But I am real. I swear it. I am as real as you are, as I sit here, typing away, in my little attic room. Do not try to tell me that I don’t exist.” Leo Plunkett, an American engineer, has come to this quiet village on the coast of Ireland, in the midst of the Second World War, to do a job which even he does not understand, and which no one cares about, anyway. He fears that he’s missing out the greatest event of his generation. He wants to be “deflowered by the war.” But he believes. He believes in his job, believes in the New Deal, believes in the Republic. He believes in believing. Then he finds an old book, unnoticed in the back of a dusty shop. There is no title. No author. It runs to nine-hundred pages and is written in language so dense and intricate that Leo is tempted to hurl the book across the room, covers flapping like an angry bird. But each time he tries to stop reading, a voice from the book draws him back inside its strange world. The German Otto Reinhart, on the other hand, has not missed out on the war. And he is tired. Mostly he is tired of pretending to be someone other than himself, tired of concocting new identities and then discarding them as easily old clothes. He is not sure who he is any more. He is not sure he is anybody. Then he meets Agnes Clarke, a local woman who loves the village where she has lived all her life. And who hates it. She longs to see something else of the world that she has only heard about. THE BLUE BOOK is the story of what happens when these three people came together in a neutral place during a time of war. One man will discover that he is not as naïve and idealistic as he had thought. The other will confront the costs of his past, and be surprised to find within himself more humanity than he had supposed. And the surprising Agnes, drawn first to one man and then to the other, will be forced make a decision which will change everything.