Murder in Byzantium (review)

The bright, elegant blue-and-gold jacket catches one's attention before the author's name and the book's title do: Murder in Byzantium, a detective novel by Julia Kristeva! We are in Santa Varvara, epicenter of the global village and home of the New Pantheon, a powerful and corrupt sect. A lone rebel named the Purifier is getting rid of the sect's leaders: as the novel begins, he has just killed his eighth victim. The police commissioner, Northrop Rilsky, investigates the serial killings; a journalist, Stéphanie Delacour, reports on them for a French newspaper; and, as the genre dictates, the two fall in love. The investigation is beginning to stall when an estranged relative of Rilsky, a history professor named Sebastian Chrest-Jones, disappears. With little to report on, Stéphanie becomes interested in this case. Going through the papers of the distinguished historian of the Crusades, she learns that the scholar was secretly writing a novel about the First Crusade and, more strangely, that he had fallen in love with Anna Comnena, the twelfth-century Byzantine princess and the main protagonist of his novel. Pressed by the scholar's wife, Rilsky becomes involved in this disappearance as well: Sebastian Chrest-Jones is after all his uncle, the illegitimate son of a common grandfather, an immigrant from Bulgaria. As the novel changes course to focus on Sebastian Chrest-Jones's mysterious disappearance, the novel's first story line recedes into the background for several chapters. But the two plots reconnect toward the end thanks to Fa Chang, Chrest Jones's lover, and to her twin brother Xiao Chang.

Murder in Byzantium might disappoint the real aficionados of detective fiction, at least those who like their thrillers light and simple. Kristeva's novel is anything but that. Part academic novel, part psychoanalytical treaty on childhood scars, part historical novel on the Crusades, part travel narrative, part political essay on the state of the world today, part philosophical meditation on identity, this is a rich and complex work. If Murder in Byzantium manages to retain a unity of purpose in spite of its apparent eclecticism, it is primarily because it is a book by Kristeva on Kristeva, the most autobiographical of her novels, according to an interview she gave to the newspaper Le Monde. Direct autobiographical references abound in the novel: "Julia Kristeva" makes several appearances as a character; Stéphanie Delacour is, like Kristeva, "the brilliant student of philosophy turned sinologist, then extreme structuralist" who finally "morphed into a globetrotting investigative reporter-detective" (75); and other characters, Sebastian and Anna, can also be seen as doubles of the author. In short, Murder in Byzantium is a book worth reading, whether as a transposition of Kristeva's own quest for personal and intellectual origins, or as an entertaining piece of detective fiction.