The background of Charles Micallef St John – engaged in the civil service for many years – would not have led many to imagine he would be writing books, let alone trilogies.

Yet that is what he did.

I had liked very much his trilogy (actually quadrology) Suwed Ulied il-Lejl in which he described the gradual evolution of a family which originated in Qormi in deepest poverty around the beginning of the 20th Century to more or less the present days.

This one volume resembles it in many ways. Its focus, this time, is Zabbar or rather Xghajra and it follows the evolution of a family once again born in poverty and religious strictness.

On the one hand there is Karmnu, a boy from Xghajra, who shows a precocious aptitude to repair things and becomes a very good car mechanic.

After sowing many wild oats he is struck by the beauty of a Muzew superjura he glimpses while fishing. For her too, it is also love at first sight, though her first reaction is to swoon.

She comes from a very strict Zabbar family. Her father is the holy terror not just of the village but also of the household and it is no coincidence two of his sons become priests (one even a kappillan), one becomes a nun and apart from Grazzja, the superjura, the last one is a nubile member of the Legion of Mary.

One would have thought that such a relationship had no chance of surviving, being a meeting of opposites, but somehow the two jelled, got married and had a child, Toni.

The book is about this Toni Bajada who was born to the smell of fish, since his father had just come up from fishing, and on whom the smell of fish, the sea, and everything to do with the sea exerts a huge attraction. Grazzja feels in her heart of heart this will not lead to anything good, but events conspire to thwart her.

Toni grows up to be a quiet, obedient, boy, but he is happiest with just himself for company. At school he sits out the breaks with two similar boys and he soon tires of the Muzew which Grazzja dutifully sent him to.

He finds that fishing is his passion, like his father, and he develops an intimate relationship with the fish who he believes speak to him.

Thus the story comes to its rather surprising and sad denouement.

But while the previous quadrology was a paean to progress and the social improvement of the Maltese family over the vicissitudes, the poverty, the war years to today’s advances, this book seems to run counter to that historical optimism: without generalizing, it seems to say the efforts of past generations to pull themselves up by the bootstraps is all futile.