Fiction: Fact or fiction - where does one end and the other begin? The short life, extensive travels and literary career of the 19th-century Scot Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) continue to inspire novelists and travel writers.
Stevenson's classic Victorian tales, such as Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both published in 1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889), soared even if his body often didn't thanks to years battling tuberculosis. His death at 44 left a great work, The Weir of Hermiston, unfinished.
But before that abrupt end, Stevenson had already written many works of fiction and non-fiction, won readers, married Fanny Osbourne, his "daring" American wife - whom he had met when in flight from her dreaded previous husband - and transplanted her and her children, his mother and himself to the Pacific Island of Samoa.
It promised happiness and possible health, or at least sufficient well-being to prolong his life. He settled quickly and was welcomed by the natives, who hailed the newcomer in the famous straw hat as "Tusitala" or storyteller.
The bones of such facts give some structure to Argentine-born, Canadian-based critic Albert Manguel's darkly delightful tale, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees. He recreates a sense of the new life in the sun, as well as Stevenson's enduring nostalgia for the damp, grey Edinburgh of his youth. This longing is brought to the surface by a chance meeting with a missionary who is also a native of Edinburgh.
So far, so good. Except that it quickly becomes obvious to the reader that the missionary is unlikely to spend time reminiscing with Stevenson about their distant home town. Baker is a cold character who dismisses their shared homeland with a curt "Now the city lies so far away, it hardly exists".
Aside from his blunt manner, Baker is clearly a fanatic - and a dangerous one who sees the business of saving souls as serious enough to justify destroying lives. Of course, this is an exotic yarn, Manguel is drawing magic from the island setting with its uninhibited islanders. And he is also demonstrating that yet again we have a novelist busily at work balancing the given facts of a life with the potential story of a life, courtesy of the twists conferred by the novelist. It is interesting, if, as always, unsettling.
From the opening page, a device is introduced, a broad-rimmed, white hat, "not unlike Stevenson's own", and so the tale unfolds. Stevenson is presented as a romantic, a man of passion, alert to beauty and not given to complaining about his illness. Throughout the narrative, Manguel displays an attractive lightness of touch, particularly in his shrewd, selective use of biographical detail. For the natives, Stevenson is a local celebrity and all is well.
Everything changes when an appalling crime is discovered and suspicion is directed at Stevenson whose romanticism may have exposed him. One horror is followed by another and everything appears to spin on the finding of the hat, compounded by a time-honoured element of literary trickery, the double, and the doubt its presence creates. When Stevenson attempts to defend himself, suddenly the once-affectionate phrase "Tusitala", storyteller, becomes loaded with irony. The spiralling injustices cleverly take over, yet there are also ambiguities. When do dream and intent merge in reality? How much evil can lurk even in the most unlikely of men? After all, good and evil often co-exist. The doubts increase.
This is a graceful book. Slightly offbeat and atmospheric, it is a bit of a literary curiosity and most clearly a tale written by a writer who is primarily a wonderful reader. True, Manguel's natives do express themselves in a rather formal, Oxford English. But then exactly how much is imagined? How much is real?.
Manguel wants to keep his reader guessing and that is more or less what Stevenson Under the Palm Trees does. Definitely a tale for a quiet moment, requiring much reflection, it is clever without being knowing and succeeds by not attempting to offer too many answers. It is also fitting that Stevenson, a reader's writer and a writer's writer, should have inspired such a polished, imaginative and ambiguous performance, in which the sun of the Pacific meets the dark Gothic of Edinburgh.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
