Marguerite Yourcenar abandons the emperor Hadrian at his villa in Tibur a few weeks before his death in the year 138. Most of us are probably prepared to take those last few weeks on trust, but the recently widowed classics teacher Adriaan — first-person narrator of the centre section of this triptych and implied narrator of the other two parts — is not. He goes to the Bay of Naples to discover where exactly Hadrian was when he died — we know he travelled to Baiae, but to which house there? — and to supply the "missing" chapter of Yourcenar's book.

Obviously a big part of the point of this book is to confront the challenging imaginative problem of how to write about the moment of death from the point of view of the person dying, something writing tutors tell you to stay away from, as it's an experience that it's logically impossible for anyone to report. But of course it's also an experience we all face, and most of us will surely have attempted to imagine what it might be like. Du Gardijn's narrator has to meet the challenge twice: once in free indirect speech for his wife Aimée, and once in first-person for Hadrian.

The centre section, where Adriaan is researching Hadrian, carefully undermines his reliability as a narrator enough to make us go back and think about what we've just read: can we take a bereaved husband's word for what was going on in the mind of his depressed spouse? How much of Hadrian is Adriaan, how much is Yourcenar, how much is authentic? And of course, how much of Adriaan is the author? The "present day" part of the story is set back to somewhere in the 1980s or 90s to separate the two of them by at least one generation (and to make the research more interesting by eliminating mobile phones and internet...).

I think the danger with a book like this must be that all three parts individually end up rather like pastiches of well-worn situations: the middle-class woman having a mental health crisis, the author in search of a story, and the philosophical classical old-timer elegantly meeting the end of his life. But we get just enough entertaining details in each part to keep us on our toes — the music of Federico Mompou in part one, the chaos of Naples in part two, and the reality of the Roman roads in part three. ( )

Na een uur kwam ze beneden, Adriaan was er niet.