Many years ago, a sober-minded friend warned me off going to Venice for the first time with my then partner. He muttered ominous things about the Venice wobble and the Venice curse. I went anyway and I have to say he had a point. It was autumn and there was something deeply uncanny about the city: fog-bound canals, labyrinthine alleyways, a general sense of decay. If my minibreak had belonged to a literary genre, it wouldn’t have been romance so much as cosmic horror.
Fiction, of course, should have prepared me. Couples have been coming unstuck in Venice since Othello and Desdemona. There are the Baxters in Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now, the basis for Nicolas Roeg’s unforgettably creepy film; Mary and Colin in The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan – the city’s not named in the novel, but it’s clearly the setting. And while the love affair in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice exists only in Von Aschenbach’s mind, the city is still his undoing. To Von Aschenbach and the others, we can now add the name of the unfortunate Evelyn Dolman, the protagonist of John Banville’s new novel, Venetian Vespers. Evelyn is a hack writer from England who has recently married an American heiress called Laura Rensselaer. Their plans to honeymoon in Venice have been delayed by the unexpected death of Laura’s father, the industrialist T Willard Rensselaer. In the wintry early months of 1900, they finally arrive and take up residence in the sinister Palazzo Dioscuri, a stone’s throw from St Mark’s. Dioscuri means the Twins – Castor and Pollux – and it will be a pair of twins who set in motion Evelyn’s inexorable but unforeseeable downfall.
From the outset, Evelyn, who narrates the novel, warns us to expect something disquieting. Part of the initial fun is trying to figure out where we are heading. There are elements of Henry James in the story’s setup – the period, the social background of its principal characters – but Banville has set his course for something darker. The bloody history of the Palazzo Dioscuri and its denizens – patrician owner, taciturn servant, saucy serving wench – suggest we’re in gothic territory, and the book is constantly teasing us with other possibilities. A cameo of a hooded woman in St Mark’s nods towards Du Maurier; a recent plague recalls Von Aschenbach. There are surreal twists, hints of madness and the supernatural; unsettling sexual encounters.
Over an illustrious literary career, Banville has been compared to James, Proust and Beckett. The received wisdom about his novels is that he’s a master of sentences, mood and allusion, but not much interested in plot. That’s not the case here. Evelyn Dolman resembles some of Banville’s other narrators in his unreliability and his love of winding syntax, but the story he tells is expertly put together. The events of the novel are compressed into a matter of days. Each vividly evoked moment leads on to the next with a deepening sense of intrigue. While the prose is dense, the action behind it is so clearly conceived that you feel as though you’re watching it unfold before you. The geography of the city, the layout of the Palazzo Dioscuri, the passing of time – it’s all conveyed with a cinematic intensity.
Banville milks the brooding atmosphere of the wintry city and while telling us explicitly that we’re headed towards a troubling denouement, he keeps us uncertain about what form it will ultimately take. I didn’t guess the ending – and I won’t spoil it for you – but it comes together very satisfyingly.
I mentioned that, like other Banville narrators, Evelyn is not only tricky, he has an orotund prose style. Not for him the simple declarative sentence; he likes a hypotactic Jamesian pile-up of adjectives and adverbs, with careful qualifications and a sprinkling of abstract nouns. To an extent, I get that Evelyn’s style is his character: splenetic, self-regarding, full of complaint. His monologue, packed with repetition and the formulations of a hack writer, is also a disguise that conceals him from us and from himself. It’s clear also that we’re not meant to like him. But in another way, I don’t get it at all.
As I grow older, I watch the reading of so-called literary novels becoming a niche interest. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but I’m constantly looking for books that will win back wavering or lapsed readers, and so I find myself frustrated by this novel’s aesthetic choices. When you have a story and a setting this strong and resonant, it feels perverse to fence it off from an audience with prose that is deliberately prolix and redundant. At times, the pastiche is skilful and contributes to the sense of the period, but at others you get this: “However, this was one of the instances, rare in that time of intense upset and bereavement, that I put my foot down, with a firmness that came as a surprise, not to say a shock, to all concerned in the matter, including, I suspect, myself.”
I would put that sentence out of its misery after “down”. It’s far from a solitary example. Evelyn’s periphrasis and repetitions verge on the obsessive: “I would never master the geography of this impossible city, which seemed to have been designed with great and subtle care specifically to deceive and distress innocent wayfarers such as myself.” The enhancements of great and subtle, deceive and distress are grating and legalistic. I guess Evelyn is used to being paid by the word, but it makes him an exhausting companion. He also writes about everything with a neurotic intensity. “My brain seemed as a purblind, underground creature clawing its way clumsily upwards towards the light.” The pomposity of this contributes to a strong sense that Banville regards his hero with mockery and indifference. It’s hard, therefore, for the reader to care about him.
As it stands, Venetian Vespers is a memorable and disturbing read; the frustration I felt is that, written with more economy, it could have been a gasp-inducing stiletto of a book.
• Venetian Vespers by John Banville is published by Faber. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
