I smell a rat

The Diary of Miss Idilia presents the reader with an unusual problem. The writing is entirely comprehensible, the tale it tells couldn’t be easier to follow. The tricky bit, though, comes with trying to work out what on earth the book is.

In 1851, 17-year-old Idilia Dubb was on holiday in the Rhineland with her middle-class Edinburgh family when one morning she disappeared. A lengthy search found nothing, and her parents returned home. Then, in 1860, workmen restoring Lahneck castle outside Coblenz discovered her remains at the top of a seemingly inaccessible tower. Near the body was Idilia’s diary, which recorded in tones of increasing anguish how she’d climbed up a wooden staircase, and how it had collapsed immediately afterwards, leaving her stranded without food, water or means of escape.

Despite widespread public interest, the Dubbs wouldn’t allow Idilia’s diary to be published — partly because it was so rude about them — and it eventually ended up the property of a private trust in Scotland, where it was recently tracked down by an American academic. Now, with Swedish and German translations already available, the original version, as edited at the time by Idilia’s friend, Genevieve Hill, finally makes its British debut…

Or at least that’s the story. Yet surely even the most credulous reader wouldn’t get too far here without smelling several large rats. In its full form, the diary tells not only of Idilia’s terrible last days, but of the whole holiday, beginning with the journey up the Rhine by steamer. No sooner have the Dubbs set off than Idilia has a dream that prefigures her later fate with eerie precision. Plenty of other foreshadowing devices then follow, of the kind more commonly found in, say, fiction.