Venetian Vespers
by John Banville
For a self-described member of the London literati, Evelyn Dolman is a surprisingly naïve and gullible narrator. Then again, the other characters in Banville’s creepily atmospheric VENETIAN VESPERS (Knopf, 302 pp., $30) might well be a particularly adroit batch of schemers. Set in Venice in the winter of 1900, this stuffy British striver’s account of his brief, ill-fated marriage to an American heiress is, from the outset, anything but tranquil. In fact, Dolman can’t get through a single night in their rented palazzo before his wife mysteriously vanishes. Not long thereafter, he will become, as he puts it, “the main suspect in a crime that as far as anyone knew had not been committed.”
The story of Dolman’s predicament bristles with dramatic fodder: family tensions, a vast fortune, a landlord obsessed with reciting his ancestors’ “age-old” depredations, a devastatingly lovely expat accompanied by her hard-drinking, insistently charming brother. But what emerges from the dark shadows of the plot is an even darker psychological portrait of a man forced to grapple with his own inner demons. “In the world as I now know it to be,” Dolman confides, “anything is possible, and there is no enormity of which we are incapable, any of us.”
The Book of I
by David Greig
The title of Greig’s THE BOOK OF I (Europa, 160 pp., $24) refers both to an early medieval name for Iona and to an unfinished copy of the gospels that survives in its monastery’s scriptorium after Norse raiders slaughter most of the Scottish island’s inhabitants. The only survivors are a young monk who chose to hide deep in the muck of a latrine rather than stay with his martyred brethren and a woman with a talent for brewing mead who cares more about the fate of her bees than that of her abusive — and now thankfully deceased — blacksmith husband. They will be joined, initially reluctantly and eventually enthusiastically, by a half-caste Norseman who has been left for dead by his companions.
Greig’s description of this unusual trio’s occupation of the island is a jaunty mix of high and low: of affecting devotion and rough high-jinks, sometimes tender and sometimes raunchy. Although new to Christianity, the warrior Grimur believes he was saved in order to protect guilt-ridden Brother Martin as he resumes work on the holy book. However, it is Una, the “mead wife,” whose potions and common sense may allow them to eke out a living in a place that’s been dismissed by the local bishop as “a massacre waiting to happen.”
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