The Keep is an interesting novel, if mainly for a big switcheroo it pulls somewhere within.
Much of the book follows Danny, a thirty-something hipster clinging tightly to his status symbols. His routine is disrupted when his uncle Howard, a retired financial guru, summons him to a remote castle in rural Czechia.
Danny’s task is to evict a cranky, elderly Baroness who has barricaded herself inside the castle’s keep (title drop). Along the way, he begins to realise he’s being played for a fool, while also confronting the emptiness of his technology-saturated life… or so it seems.
Those question marks matter, because the novel quietly leans into metafiction. Danny’s story isn’t as straightforward as it initially appears. Framed loosely as a piece of light horror, the book carries a constant sense of unease. Strange details linger at the edges, and several chapters suddenly shift focus to characters seemingly unrelated to Danny or Howard.
These interruptions appear sporadically, gradually revealing a second narrative rooted in realism rather than the gothic strangeness of the castle plot. It’s a structural trick that keeps the reader slightly off balance, never fully certain which version of the story they’re meant to trust.
Like her other work, Egan shows a knack for writing fiction that’s both entertaining and quietly meaningful. The Keep isn’t my favourite of her novels but it highlights her greatest strength: an ability to draw out complex, flawed characters and invite us to genuinely sympathise, even as the ground beneath them shifts.
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