Disregarding Genre Conventions as a Literary and Political Gesture
Breda Biščak (translator of Castillo into Slovenian)
Due to its important strategic location in the middle of the Mediterranean, the Maltese archipelago was an object of desire for centuries. Its shores were visited by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, the Knights of StJohn, the French, and the British. All of them left their mark on the islands’history, culture, and language.
With around four hundred thousand speakers today, Maltese belongs to the Semitic language family. It was brought to Malta in the ninth century by Arab settlers from nearby Sicily, and under the influence of Italian, Sicilian, and English it gradually developed into the Maltese language we know today. Following independence from British rule in September 1964, Malta officially became bilingual; alongside Maltese and English, many of its inhabitants also speak Italian.
The period surrounding independence left a profound imprint on the collective consciousness of the population. It also gave its name to the Slovenian anthology of contemporary Maltese literature Wara Settembru (After September), prepared in2018 for the Vilenica International Literary Festival by the Maltese writer Immanuel Mifsud and the Slovenian poet Peter Semolič.
One of the authors included in the anthology is Clare Azzopardi, the writer of the present meta-detective novel, as well as a playwright and author of children’s picture books. Hershort-story collections The Green Line (2006) and The Names They Left Behind (originally published in 2014; Slovenian translation published by LUD Literatura in 2019) both received Malta’s National Book Prize. Castillo was also shortlisted for the award. To date, the novel has been translated into Italian, English, and Arabic, and has been adapted both for the stage and for film.
Selected in 2015 as one of ten New Voices from Europe, Clare Azzopardi has in recent years been living in the Netherlands, where she is pursuing a doctoral degree. Her research develops a typology of different forms of silence in Maltese prose written after 1990—a theme that also lies at the heart of the present novel. As a writer who often explores the lives of women silenced for centuries within Malta’s patriarchal culture, she began asking herself what happens when we pay attention not only to what is spoken, but also to what remains unsaid.
Disregarding Genre Conventions
Unlike Slovenia, which is currently experiencing a flourishing of domestic crime fiction, Malta has only a handful of writers working in the genre. In the past, one of the better-knownnames was Ivo Muscat Azzopardi, who is mentioned in Castillo; today, the most prominent figure is Mark Camilleri. Yet among them there is not a single Maltese woman. It was precisely this fact that first prompted the author to reflect and then to invent a Maltese female crime writer—K. Penza—and to writea meta-detective novel about her.
The term meta-detective novel is justified by the fact that Azzopardi plays with, and interrogates, the crime genre both at the level of its fundamental conventions and at the level of narrative structure. She is, of course, fully aware of her literary procedures and even comments on them in a fictional letter:
“To take another example, I don’t think you always stick to the rules of style and neither do you always follow the golden rules of the detective novel mentioned by the celebrated writer Father Knox. Perhaps you would accept a word of advice from a reader who has full mastery of the Maltese language …?”
Castillo was translated into Slovenian from Albert Gatt’s authorised English translation (Gatt is the author’s husband). Owing to the nature of the Englishlanguage, nouns and verb endings generally do not reveal gender. In other words: was the above letter in Castillo written by a male reader or afemale reader? As a translator, I was forced to answer that question, since the nature of Slovenian requires a gender distinction even where English does not.
If we bear in mind that Malta was, as already noted, a markedly patriarchal society, it is difficult to imagine a woman claiming complete mastery of the Maltese language. If you have spent centuries oppressed and denied access to education, you internalise that oppression to such an extent that the idea of fully mastering your mother tongue hardly even occurs to you. The author herself confirmed that the writer of the fictional letter is male.
Another small difficulty I encountered while translating the novel into Slovenian concerned “the celebrated writer Father Knox” and his “golden rules of the detective novel”.Who was Father Knox? Why had I never heard of him? Surely I ought to know who he was, having studied English language and literature—such were the thoughts running through my mind. It took me quite some time to console myself with the fact that I was probably not the only Slovenian-English translator hearing hisname for the first time. Maltese readers are likely more familiar with him because Malta remained under British rule for more than a century and a half,during which British literature and the English language were accorded a privileged status.
Father Ronald Knox was a priest and writer active in the early twentieth century, and a member of the Detection Club, founded in 1930. Its most famous member was probably AgathaChristie. Upon joining the Club, its founding members swore to uphold the “Knox Commandments,” thereby giving readers a fair chance to identify the murderer themselves. The association still exists today, although its rules have since been relaxed and are often broken. Since they are important for understanding Castillo, I shall briefly summarise them here.
The criminal must be someone introduced early in the novel; supernatural agencies must be excluded; only one secret room or passage is permitted; no previously unknown poisons or devices may be introduced; no Chinese characters may appear in the story; the detective must be helped neither by chance nor byinexplicable intuition; the detective must not commit the crime, nor turn outto be the criminal being sought; the detective must not discover clues that arenot immediately available to the reader as well; the detective’s foolish companion—the Watson figure—must not be more intelligent than the average reader; and the story must not involve twins or doubles.
Castillo flagrantly violates these rules, both within the main narrative—about Amanda, who first searches for her mother and later investigates the murder of her aunt, the crime novelist K. Penza—and within the embedded stories (extractsfrom K. Penza’s detective novels). The main narrative features twin sisters; the very first embedded novel (Strada Marina) introduces Chinese characters; and by the end of the novel, Castillo is not merely implicated in a murder but, in one version of K. Penza’s final novel, actually ends up in prison.
Could we say that, in her meta-detective novel, Clare Azzopardi "writes back to the Empire," to paraphrase the title of the celebrated work of postcolonial theory (The Empire Writes Back), by deliberately refusing to play by the established rules of the game—or of the genre? In an interview for the Slovenian literary website LUD Literatura, the author explained that the disregard for convention which she attributes to K. Penza is not merely a literary gesture but a without any prior knowledge of the historical and political events in Malta during the 1980s, when part of the story is set. However, even a basic familiarity with that period quickly reveals that this meta-detective novel holds up a mirror to Malta's recent history. The following outline of the historical and political context is based on Joe Gatt's concise afterword to the English edition of the novel (The Lives and Deaths of K. Penza, Praspar Press, 2022).
As mentioned above, Malta gained its independence in September 1964. In 1971, the Labour Party, led by Dominic Mintoff, won the general election, and Mintoffbecame Prime Minister. During his very first year in office, he tripled the rent Britain paid for maintaining its military base on the island, nationalised several British corporations, forced NATO to leave Malta, and barred American naval vessels from entering Maltese waters.
Mintoff succeeded in securing new allies and new sources of funding without turning Malta into a colony once again. He invited the Chinese to Malta, where they built a new dry dock for servicing oil tankers in the harbour, long regarded as a symbolic stronghold of the Labour movement. Libya, believed to possess Africa's richest oil reserves, provided Malta with substantial loans and military equipment. Muammar Gaddafi became something of an "icon, a rich uncle in parade uniform," and,as the novel suggests, people were particularly fond of having their photographs taken with him. Yet for Azzopardi, Gaddafi also functions as a metaphor for the tribal leader who lives in a tent and thrives on divisive politics based on the logic of "us vs. them."
Meanwhile, corruption spread steadily on the domestic front. The state employed roughlyone-third of the workforce, either directly in the public sector or indirectly through state-owned enterprises, making it easy to enforce a policy of carrot and stick. Loyalty to the ruling party was rewarded with promotion; opposition could result in being transferred to a workplace on the other side of the island. At the same time, the opposition—the century-old Nationalist Party,which had traditionally championed Malta's Italian heritage as well as the interests of the middle classes and the educated elite—was forced to reinvent itself.
The rift between the two major political parties reached its peak during the 1980s, when supporters of both sides poured onto the streets and the island was rockedby a succession of bomb attacks of various kinds—car bombs, letter bombs, and others. At one point, a bomb was even planted outside the home of the Chief ofPolice. As Joe Gatt concludes in his account, "It was as if two societies existed side by side, and they only came together in conflict. A line split thecountry down the middle, and the demarcation ran through town, village, office, workshop, and sometimes the family home."
Castillo is therefore not simply another detective novel—or even another meta-detective novel—but also a literary "container" (to borrow the psychoanalytic term) into which the dynamics of Malta's divided society in the 1980s, the society in which the author herself grew up, have been poured. As Clare Azzopardi remarked in an interview for the website LUD Literatura, "The long shadow of colonialism left us with deep divisions, with a sense that authority and power always come from elsewhere—something bigger, better, mightier than us."She also explained how she drew on personal memories in writing the novel:
"I was still very young then, and of course my memories are fragmentary, but I do recall my parents being anxious. I particularly remember my mother crying aftera bomb exploded next to the police station in Sliema, very close to where she had grown up and where my grandparents still lived. K. Penza’s car bombing in Castillo actually comes from that particular memory."
The influence of the former Labour Prime Minister Dominic Mintoff, nicknamed il-Perit("the Architect"), on everyday life had already been explored inClare Azzopardi's earlier collection of short stories, The Names They Left Behind. The abbreviation pdm—formed from the initials of his nickname and surname—appears in every story, while the affection of the working classes for his government, under which the welfare state was established and workers' living standards improved, is particularly evident in the collection'sfinal story, "Polly." In it, Polly – a disabled woman whose newborn child is taken away by her parents because, in Malta's rigidly conservative society, an illegitimate child brought shame upon the entire family – finds an important imaginary protector in Mintoff's public image and speeches about independence and the working class.
The Influence of the Social and Political on The Personal
The extent to which the private is intertwined with the political—succinctly expressed in the feminist slogan "the personal is political"—is evident both in the above-mentioned short-story collection and in the meta-detective novel Castillo. Both books are united by their focus on women's lives,on giving women a voice and empowering them, to use today's terminology. Women from different social backgrounds and with different levels of education speak in both works; in Castillo especially, their voices are frequently rendered through dialogue, a form that is perhaps particularly natural to Azzopardi, who is also an accomplished playwright.
In Castillo, one could say that women assume all three of the roles traditionally associated with detective fiction—at least in the main narrative: the victim (K. Penza), the detective (Amanda, in the metaphorical sense, as she investigates both hermother's disappearance and her aunt's murder), and the murderer (Emma). In the embedded stories, by contrast, the role of the detective remains conventionally assigned to a male protagonist and his exclusively male team, while both victims and perpetrators include women as well as men.
A second point of convergence between the two books is their treatment of motherhood. In this respect, Clare Azzopardi participates in a broadercontemporary international trend that challenges idealised representations of motherhood, traditionally embodied in Catholic societies, such as Malta, by the image of Mary with the Child.
Through Amanda's story, Azzopardi addresses a subject that remains a deep taboo: the mother who can no longer bear the burden of motherhood and abandons her child. Her departure naturally leaves a lasting family trauma. Amanda's father is unable to recover from it and, consumed by anger and helplessness, brands his wife a witch.
Growing up in the silence that so often follows trauma, Amanda becomes obsessed with one question: why did her mother leave her? The search for an answer develops into an almost detective-like investigation of the past. Yet instead of finding the explanation she longs for, she uncovers a series of disturbing truths, eachone propelling her further into a new investigation—this time into the murder of her aunt, the celebrated crime novelist.
Like Scheherazade, Azzopardi continually postpones the resolution of the story by inserting one crime narrative after another. Yet unlike the traditionaldetective novel, where the identity and motive of the murderer are ultimately made clear, the murders in Castillo are never conclusively solved. Theperpetrators are merely suggested. Even the central murder—that of K.Penza—remains officially unsolved and unpunished, although the novel strongly implies that the popular crime writer was eliminated by those in political power.
One might therefore argue that at this point the novel transcends the boundaries of conventional crime fiction and moves towards a psychological exploration of the intergenerational consequences of "not-good-enough" motherhood. By the novel's end, Amanda is left with the daily challenge of living with theburden of both what has been spoken and what has remained unspoken, with herself collapsing under the weight of motherhood and the demands of ordinarylife, thereby repeating her mother's pattern. A partial explanation for Emma'sabandonment of her daughter lies in the fact that Emma herself never experienced loving motherhood: her own mother's affection was unequally distributed, directed primarily towards Emma's twin sister, Catherine. Separation—between mother and daughter, between Amanda's parents, between twin sisters—is portrayed throughout the novel as deeply problematic, offering a remarkably faithful reflection of real life.
To sum up, the novel beautifully demonstrates that every human relationship—whether maternal, sibling, romantic, or otherwise—is embeddedwithin a specific historical moment and a particular society. In other words, each of us carries the burden not only of our personal relationships but also of the social realities of our own time and the countless spoken and unspoken expectations.
Taboos, or the Unspoken, in Crime Fiction
As mentioned at the outset, the novel departs from the conventions of classic detective fiction not only thematically but also structurally, through itsintricate interplay between the main narrative and the embedded stories. At times these narratives are linked through intertextual references. Two examples from Amanda's story will illustrate this.
In the chapter "Nanna Ġanna," we learn that Emma used to read K. Penza'snovel The Hunchback aloud to her mother. Its contents are revealedimmediately afterwards in the embedded story "Pullu," which is taken directly from that novel.
In the first part of the chapter "They Had Absolutely Nothing in Common," Amanda finally succeeds in visiting Anne, her aunt's former school friend and close companion. In the second part, Amanda reads her daughter Eler, the picture book about the patchwork elephant. The Guardian has interpreted Elmer as a symbol of the LGBT+community. By invoking Elmer, Azzopardi introduces the theme of same-sex love, which she then develops during Amanda's subsequent conversationwith Anne. "Or was it a secret?" Amanda asks, referring to the fact that Anne and Cathy had been unable to live openly together. "Things weredifferent back then," Anne replies laconically.
Living with a hunchback (as Pullu did), living with a physical disability (as Castillo does), living in a same-sexrelationship (as Cathy and Anne did)—these are all issues that may be regarded as taboo, and Azzopardi introduces them both into the main narrative and into the embedded stories.
Castillo abounds in such subjects. They include the already mentioned theme of themother who abandons her child; the various forms of criminal activity connectedwith the harbour (which, in Castillo's view, must be "dirty, sad and sinful"); the operations of the Maltese mafia, explored in the embedded novel TheHole; the police killing of alleged suspects in the embedded novel TheTonna Brothers, through which Azzopardi transforms into fiction an eventthat actually took place during Malta's turbulent 1980s; and many others.
By addressing a wide range of taboo subjects—topics that are usually either shrouded in silence or sensationalised by the yellow press—the author quietlyilluminates the darker sides of (Maltese) society within a genre that reaches a relatively broad readership.
Echoes in Extra-Literary Reality
Finally, I would like to pause over one phenomenon that raises an intriguing question of interpretation.
In October 2017, the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had been born shortly before Malta gained independence, was killed near her home by a car bomb. In her reporting, she investigated government corruption, nepotism, alleged money laundering, connections between Malta's online gambling industry and organised crime, and other sensitive issues. During the final two years of her life, she exposed information concerning prominent Maltese politicians and their links to the internationally publicised Panama Papers scandal.
In Castillo, the novelist K. Penza likewise uses fiction to expose corruption at the highest levels of government and is herself killed in a carbombing. The Maltese original of Castillo was published in 2018. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Or a carefully constructed literary metaphor?
The author answered the question as follows: "It was really a coincidence. The novel was already finished and handed to the publisher in August 2017, while Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in October of that same year. Her death was a devastating shock. I remember thinking to myself exactly what you are asking now. But the truth is that Malta had already gone through a period of bombings in the 1980s, many of them tied to political tensions. The 80s were probably the most turbulent years in our political history."
Two women writing critically about the society in which they live. One fictional, the other real. Because of their critical engagement, both meet precisely thesame fate. True, in both cases the setting is Malta. Yet does not the fate of Daphne Caruana Galizia—which unfolded only after Castillo had already been completed—bear poignant witness to the paradoxical truth of imaginative literature, and to both the power and the powerlessness of the written word?