The Thane of the Castle where the Dead Live

Niall Campbell is the 18th Thane of a stronghold in Argyll whose Gaelic name translates as ‘The Castle where the Dead Live,’ its resident spirits including King Robert the Bruce and Flora MacDonald. The Thane, a world war one air ace, spends much of his time researching the history of his lineage and educating his heir Diarmid. As he tells Diarmid: ‘the most important question of our lives is: do we survive death?’ He sends Diarmid to study medicine at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the same time developing his undoubted paranormal gifts. The Thane‘s wife Bunny, a relative of Scott Fitzgerald, is a cotton planter’s daughter from the Deep South of America, obsessed with jazz, her shoes clattering the Charleston on the castle’s flagstones. Diarmid’s sister Marsaili is a slothful candy-guzzler until she causes poltergeist activity in the castle, becomes a reformed daughter and Parisian model. Diarmid falls in love with a gifted medium, but gains his sexual initiation from a mixed race Tantrism exponent. Picasso will paint Marsaili; Diarmid will become a disciple of the Russian-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff at his Institute at Fontainebleau; visit Jung in Switzerland for a discussion on their shared belief in the paranormal. In this magic realism novel on an international scale the author explores profound questions of life and death.