Venetian Vespers

John Banville

VENICE… a city that has inspired both artists and writers, a place of intense light and the deepest darkness, a meandering network of winding alleyways and opaque canals where imaginations are set alight and reality and fantasy have a habit of merging.

It’s also the larger-than-life setting for an enthralling and utterly transporting new novel from John Banville, one of Ireland’s most gifted authors who won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 and – far from resting on his laurels now that he is closing in on his eightieth birthday – is still treating readers to his extraordinary writing skills.

With a gift for words that raises novel-writing to dizzy heights of literary excellence, Wexford-born Banville (pictured below) is producing some of his best work yet, not least the award-winning Strafford and Quirke crime series which is based in Dublin in the Fifties and mired in dirty politics, religious tensions and the debates and concerns of the post-war period in Ireland. And now he has turned his talents to Venetian Vespers, a haunting and atmospheric fin de siècle noir which harnesses all the chilling tropes of a decaying and decadent city and brings them to glorious life with the tale of a hapless and hopelessly inept English hack caught up in a web of mystery, malice and supernatural skulduggery while honeymooning in wintertime Venice.

And what a mesmerising mixed bag of genres Banville dishes up for us as our self-styled ‘man of letters’ – whose lofty ambitions  to be a ‘lord of language’ have so far taken him no further than Grub Street – grapples with an unwilling bride, unsettling dreams, and a pair of roguish siblings whose arrival turns his life upside down.

In the winter of 1899 as the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman – who harbours a grandiose dream of one day being ‘placed among the immortals’ – marries Laura Rensselaer, the younger daughter of a renowned and immensely wealthy American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune, leading to a comfortable and settled life for himself.

But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before his death in a riding accident and only weeks after their wedding, leads to her being disinherited. The now unhappy newlyweds continue with their plans to travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo.

Laura – his ‘vivid’ and ‘inscrutable’ wife who is ‘indifferent’ to both him and his advances – sees the overarching stillness of the palazzo as ‘the very essence of hushed romance’ but to Evelyn, every sound from those ‘rank alleyways’ and ‘turbid expanses of intermittently and evilly glinting, oily waters was a secret call, sly, suggestive, resonant with mockery and menace.’

When a series of seemingly otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate, Evelyn’s already frayed nerves start to disintegrate. Leaving his wife alone one evening, he ventures out and makes the acquaintance of the ingratiating and ‘satanic’ Freddie FitzHerbert and his sister Cesca Ransome, a woman regarded by Evelyn as ‘of the purest, most fetching loveliness.’ It’s a meeting that precipitates a disastrous event back at the palazzo after which his wife mysteriously disappears. Evelyn speculates that it might be the mist that is blanketing the floating city… or could he be losing his mind?

Banville’s classy mystery plays out slowly and tantalisingly against a turn-of-the-century Venice rendered dark, wet, gloomy, and full of the doom-laden shadows that have littered the novels of writers like Daphne du Maurier, Henry James, Thomas Mann and Jeanette Winterson.

In our narrator Evelyn, for whom ‘everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder,’ we have the classic artless narcissist… an easily manipulated, complacent and self-aggrandising dupe who proves to be ripe prey for ruthless schemers who are well-armed and more than ready to take advantage of his arrogance, lack of insight, and inadequacy.

Set during the city’s famous carnival season – noted for its mysterious masks, secrets and symbols –Venetian Vespers itself turns out to be very much an intricate and entertaining puzzle packed with unanswered questions, literary extravagances, caustic humour, and the enthralling slippery slope between reality and the paranormal. Very much a tale of people in a certain time and a certain place, Banville harnesses the gothic vibes of Venice to create characters that spring from the page, many of them with their complexities and devilish ambiguities veiled in mystery, while Evelyn’s thought processes are fully exposed, laid bare for readers to explore and dissect.

Richly descriptive, overflowing with Banville’s masterful and elegant storytelling, and with an enigma at its heart that spreads its tentacles from first page to last, this edgy and endlessly fascinating winter’s tale is a slice of word wizardry that no discerning reader should miss.
(Faber & Faber, hardback, £16.99)