CRIME:The general effect of reading the 18th Commissario Brunetti novel is like watching paint dry on an old master, writes CORMAC Ó CUILLEANÁIN
About FaceBy
Donna LeonWilliam Heinemann, 278 pp, £16.99
Brunetti's VeniceBy
Toni Sepeda,
with an introduction by Donna LeonWilliam Heinemann, 293 pp. £12.99
VENICE IS Awonderfully intriguing city, coiled around itself, intersected by hundreds of winding waterways and twisting streets full of noise, quiet, crowds, emptiness, splendour, squalor. Wander a few streets off the beaten track and you're suddenly caught in a narrow maze where, even with a map, you can get hopelessly lost.
In fact, you need not just a map but also a compass to make sense of the place. Better than either would be a reliable guide, preferably a native like Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police force.
Donna Leon has chronicled the adventures of this fictional detective since 1972, garnering an impressive array of critical accolades, and a devoted army of readers. The 18th in the series, About Face, involves Brunetti in a case of murder, tax-dodging and toxic waste disposal, generously peppered with topical references to life and politics in Italy today. Crooked businessmen, corrupt political decisions, semi-competent bureaucrats, deregulated dentistry, facelifted femmes fatales and sinister mafiosi flit across the scene as Brunetti uncovers the secrets of an enigmatic dinner guest at the house of his parents-in-law and the death of an overzealous Carabiniere. The reader is constantly being ushered into the linguistic and cultural world of native Venetians and titillated by Italian-language references to various foodstuffs, dishes, varieties of grappa, official titles, palazzi and vaporetto stops. Most of these linguistic details are accurate. The "insider" illusion is well maintained, and there is some pleasant interplay between the series characters.
THE TROUBLE ISthat all of these details tend to swamp what, this time around, is a slackly plotted tale constructed on too many easy parallels, coincidences and happenstance, hampered in places by narrative cliché, poor copy-editing, occasional lapses of psychological credibility and proportionality. Sledgehammers crack nuts. Minor mysteries are manufactured out of the concealment of non-mysterious circumstances. Gods pop out of machines to explain ancillary puzzles. Suspects turn up on cue.
Equally annoying (to this reader) are the tiresome displays of literary erudition: Brunetti is instructed to read Ovid's Fasti,Book 2, in order to proceed to the next level of enlightenment (local readers can substitute Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece).
And it’s not just the Latin lovers: Mrs Brunetti, an academic Anglicist, is into Henry James, and has infected her husband with a rash of literary tags. Which brings me to the problem of sex: the plot partly hinges on it, but the author’s attitude veers between coy primness (Mr and Mrs Brunetti don’t seem to get around to it much) and disgusted vulgarity (an unsavoury character “fucked like a fag”).
Then there is the snobbery. Brunetti’s father-in-law is a count and collects valuable old paintings. Brunetti looks down on gamblers, tourist traps, commerce, industry, crooked trade unionists. His private thoughts are often cast in the hoity-toity tones of a better-class tourist: “Perhaps it was the lack of commercialisation that made him love Campo San Polo, for only two sides of it held shops, the others having resisted the lure of Mammon. The church, of course, had succumbed and now charged people to enter, having discovered that beauty brought more income than grace.” That is not an unfairly extracted quotation, and may indeed help to sell the book to readers who enjoy its sly, twee knowingness.
The general effect of reading the novel was like watching paint dry on an old master. I tried adding some Vivaldi (played by I Musici on my exclusive Bose stereo), and felt better at once: snobbery with violins. When I added a cheap grappa, the book seemed even better. I began to notice some beautifully turned sentences: “A certain slant of light told Brunetti what had happened even before his eyes were fully opened or he was really awake. He looked towards the windows and saw a thin ridge of snow balanced on the railing of the terrace and, behind it, white-roofed houses and a sky so blue it hurt his eyes . . . Already there were tiny trails of a triple-toed bird’s prints in the snow on the terrace.” Yes, Venice is breathtaking, and Donna Leon’s prose occasionally reminds us of that.
JUST AS IAN RANKINhas inspired Rebus Tours of Edinburgh (led by a professional actor), and Marek Krajewski's Breslau quartet has spawned bus tours of old Wroclaw, there is now a Venetian rambling industry based on the Brunetti canon. Toni Sepeda, who runs the only private tours authorised by Donna Leon, has compiled Brunetti's Venice, a reverential recital of passages from the oeuvre, laid out with connecting commentary in a dozen walking trails, and a chapter on the islands in the lagoon. One pictures her authorised walkers peevishly muttering against the hordes of lumpen tourists whose paths they cross, or snarling at rival gangs of unlicenced Brunetti stalkers. Occasionally, no doubt, this leads to mayhem. Even murder.
It has to be admitted that some of the passages quoted from the earlier works are just as nice as Mary McCarthy's Venice Observed. Unfortunately, a common thief snuck into Professor Sepeda's book and stole the index. Or perhaps the publishers, in these sadly delinquent times, neglected to include one. O tempora!
Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin teaches Italian in Trinity College Dublin. As Cormac Millar, he has published two crime novels with Penguin