My favourite book is "The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins. I first read it as a 10-year-old girl in the USSR, in Russian, in an excellent translation by a rather dubious character - Marietta Shaginyan, an Armenian Communist with a penchant for pronouncing after the Kruschtev's "thaw" that Stalin's ideas on how rout the intelligentsia & freethinkers were the best in creating the Utopia of Marx & Engels, never mind the tens of millions of victims - starved in 3 famines in Ukraine, 2 in the Volga region, one in Kazakhstan; murdered in the Lyubanka cellars, sent to Siberia; deported nations of the Crimea, the Caucasus & the Volga region, and so it continues: the list, alas, is endless & it pains my heart to go on...
When first I came to England in 1995, the first thing I did was to go to the charity shops in the West London's suburbs, the leafy Ealing & to find a dog-eared preloved copy in English, with the annotations in the margins made previously by different contributors - some were in ink, some in ballpens of various colours. I have to say that deciphering & reading them gave me as much enjoyment & pleasure as reading the novel itself. I felt in tune with the mentality of the western readers, which was no surprise to me as my forefathers & foremothers were dissidents. To my surprise, the grammatical structure, the sentiment & the author'sunique voice were as I remembered them from my childhood in a Russian translation. The woman was a political dinosaur & an apologizer for Stalin's reign of terror but oh, could she translate!..
The storyline develops with each new narrator, like a new side of a polished diamond being exposed to our eye. The Moonstone is slowly rotating on a stand, presenting us with a clue, sometimes obscuring the truth, other time adding a new layer to the mystery - its disappearance during the night after it was given as a birthday present to a young girl, a daughter of a landed gentry family. We meet the estate owners; their factotum - a house steward; a mysterious female servant falling in a love with a beau of an heiress; two doctors: one is a local GP & the other is his assistant, a mongrel of sorts, from the very heart of the colonies of the far-spread British Empire. In the mix the author also threw a renowned philanthropist and leader of several Ladies' Charity Groups in London; Indian jugglers (who are in fact are brahmins of the highest cast); a detective from London; a family lawyer; a famous traveller to India; a seedy London moneylender; a street urchin, and a reclusive and dishonorable Army Officer who fought for the English army in India and stole the Moonstone diamond while he was there in 1799: we learn about it in the preface. He leaves the diamond to his niece in his will, in what was probably a malicious attempt to infect the family that shunned him as a black sheep & a man of bad repute, with its ill luck, thus getting his revenge on the relatives who had rejected him. And let me not forget a nephew, who is in love with the young girl, the editorial force behind the collected narratives of the novel—he has asked everyone to write what they know about the disappearance of the diamond, in the interests of clearing his own name.
The finale is a masterpiece: I will not spoil it for you, my lips are sealed. I would imagine that there are still some books being delivered as we speak to the charity shops where you live. They need our help, so that they can help others - those in need of medical treatment, a bed in a hospice, cat and dog food for an animal rescue centre, a free food parcel, and a Christmas gift to a child in a detention centre for refugees like myself.