Published: 10 November, 2011
by EMMA KLEIN

THE subtitle of Gloria Tessler’s striking new novel could well be “Michaela Possessed” since it is Michaela, the “other woman” in the Carmen legend, who is the chronicler of this highly original contemporary reworking of the well-loved saga, made famous in George Bizet’s opera.

She is “possessed” from the time when Jose enters her life and becomes the “you” to whom the narrative is addressed.

Set in an imaginary republic in Central America, divisions between rich and poor are one of the central themes.

Michaela is the younger daughter of an oligarch family, somewhat detached from her financier father, constantly on the telephone, her narcissistic mother, autistic sister and heartless brother, but close to her psychically aware grandmother.

She recalls first seeing Jose when he was “one of the poor campesino children” who had come to stare at the rich passers-by in the village square. He is the only child who refuses the coins she proffers.

She continually looks out for him on her outings “like a young infanta heavily guarded by women” and one day he eventually speaks to her: “little girl, soon to be woman….”, words she will always remember.

Years later it is the teenage Michaela who rescues Jose, an army conscript, who had shot a brutal foreman.

Hez had knocked down his mother as she and his father, agricultural workers, were labouring in a sugar plantation.

Michaela, who had observed the episode, takes Jose to her family home, where she shelters him as a friend.

The deserter becomes genteel under an assumed identity, but is not afraid, on occasion, to challenge his host, Michaela’s father, as to why, for example “2 per cent of the population should own 60 per cent of the land”.

Carmen enters their lives before they become lovers, when they come across a troop of factory girls on an outing to an unknown town.

She is the most arresting of the girls, dressed in red and black, and makes her way down the steps outside the factory “with great dignity” before starting to sing the habanera, a song Michaela had never heard before, after which she throws a rose at Jose.

He had already commented about the factory girls to Michaela, before Carmen’s appearance, saying that “though they are poor and can barely subsist on their wages, they know how to live”.

It is at this stage, although Jose professes no interest in her, that Carmen begins, at first slowly, to infiltrate Michaela’s psyche.

While she and Jose eventually become intimate, Michaela is aware that she is making love to a man “already under the spell of another”.

With civil war raging in the background, the complexity of relationships between Jose and Michaela, Jose and Carmen and Carmen and Michaela is vividly and intriguingly depicted, culminating in a most singular set piece scene on a mountain-top.

The effect on Michaela is so overwhelming that, despite bouts of promiscuity, she is unable to move on in her emotional life, either to accept Jose, when he pleads with her to return to him after Carmen has left him, or to develop a fulfilling relationship with Pedro, the only one of many suitors she does not totally dismiss, a man who seems totally devoted to her and whose skill as a “fixer” enables Michaela and her family to escape to safety at the time of the revolution that eventually takes over their country.

Gloria Tessler has succeeded in con­vey­ing the atmos­phere and back­drop of her imag­inary Central American locale, which leap off the page as con­vincingly as the scenes of London, where Michaela settles after her flight from the revolution and from where she recounts her story.

The biographer of the late Lady Amelie Jacobovits, wife of former Chief Rabbi Lord Jacobovits, Gloria Tessler is also a journalist and has written two plays. The Windmill, about Holocaust artist Peter Kien, was performed at the Union Theatre a few years ago and her more recent play, Unveiling Hagar, was performed at the New End Theatre last year.

She was inspired by the Latin American writers Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write Dancing with Carmen.

• Dancing with Carmen. By Gloria Tessler. AuthorHouse £10.99