After chuckling out loud after only a few paragraphs, I had no doubt at all about why Dinah Lee Küng’s A Visit from Voltaire was on the list of potential Orange Prize winners in 2004. Her early chapters plunge us into a world that is so familiar; the world of the immigrant into the closed society of a small Swiss village. St Cergue is evoked with its railway snaking up through the village, its families who have lived there since the days of Voltaire and its traditional Vaudois ways of shutting out foreigners and all they stand for.

With the narrator, we struggle with the carpenter’s bills which consume all the family’s savings, the Swiss requirements that preclude the placing of an ‘island’ in the kitchen, the wildcats that nest in the roof insulation and the vagaries of the Swiss school system.

Poor, honest Alexander’s academic future is almost curtailed when he is the only child who doesn’t run away after the group of school children have accidentally set a stationary train in motion.

Into this wonderfully familiar world steps an uninvited guest who accompanies the narrator through most of the remainder of her first year in St Cergue. Husband, Peter, is busy with his Red Cross work but Voltaire compensates for his absence. Consuming litres of coffee and mastering the fax machine, the Internet and the telephone, Voltaire, a lively ghost, continues the literary and humanitarian work that occupied his lifetime two centuries earlier. We witness his hilarious response to the parent-teacher meeting and relive, with him, his rich libertine lifestyle.

The narrator’s own real involvement with modern political causes is interspersed with Voltaire’s narrative so that we touch on the unjustified imprisonment of Xu Wenli, the Chinese democracy activist and the human rights struggle for Dr Shaikh in Pakistan.

"V." is a whimsical and endearing companion who is an invaluable help to the narrator in her struggle to come to terms with her state as an emotional and cultural castaway in an alien environment. He teaches her how to live life to the fullest. However, he is a demanding and expensive guest who ages as the narrative develops. He has to go. His initial departure leaves too many questions unresolved, but a delightful finale awaits the reader.

This novel is astonishingly rich in so many ways. The local area of the Geneva basin is evoked with St Cergue coming alive for us even to the 50 bends of the road up from the Geneva basin, and life in the UN and in the foreign community of Hong Kong. The author’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Voltaire’s life and works makes him a convincing figure in the 21st century as well as ‘La Lumière’ – the light of his own century.

A great read with a little more substance than most contemporary novels. Amazon have copies and Books Books Books too, so it is a good tip for Christmas reading.

Review by Shirly Curran
© Geneva Lunch 2009