The Finger of Saturn

Viac o knihe

The novel is narrated in the first person (unusual for Canning) by Robert Rolt, a landowner who has had a brief career in the Foreign Office but now runs the Dorset estates he has inherited from an older brother. Two years before the book begins his wife Sarah vanished. A man from a secret branch of the Foreign Office comes to him with surveillance film of a woman called Angela Starr who resembles his wife. Rolt is immediately sure it is her. He meets her. She tells him she is an amnesia victim with no memory going back more than a year, but agrees on seeing photographs and handwriting samples that she must be Sarah Rolt. She returns to live with him. They visit Sarah's mother in Italy. There is a mysterious incident in which a speedboat may have been trying to kill them while they are swimming. Meanwhile the secret services are trying to get Rolt to help them investigate International Industrial Systems Limited, a firm in which Sarah's mother has a large investment. And Sarah still has no recollection of her missing year. The final explanations involves an element of science fiction, the only time that Canning drifted into this genre. It also maintains the thread, started in The Python Project and culminating in Birdcage, of the essential nastiness of the British secret services.