Writing in 1882, Henry James complained that “There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject.” The subject, in this case, was Venice, the endlessly depicted city. Venice, James wrote, “scarcely exists anymore as a city at all ... she exists only as a battered peep show and bazaar.”
The exhaustion of Venice as a subject naturally failed to stop James writing about it. How could he, of all writers, resist a peep show? The floating city forms the backdrop for one of James’s most perfect novellas, The Aspern Papers (1888). A nameless literary man suspects that a cache of letters by the late poet Jeffrey Aspern (“he hangs high in the heaven of our literature”) moulders away in the “sequestered and dilapidated” Venetian palazzo of the elderly Miss Bordereau, who was in her youth Aspern’s lover, or so rumour has it. The literary man schemes and charms his way into the palazzo, and ...
Henry James’s fictional Venice is like everybody else’s fictional Venice: a city of masks and secret desires. “Venice is the world’s unconscious,” suggested Mary McCarthy in 1956, and writers have always seemed to find it so: think of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach, expiring in a chaste Liebestod as he watches Tadzio frolic on a Lido beach. And what are we to make of this: “For as long as I could remember, even back into childhood, I had harboured a secret wish to know what it would be like to be a woman; in fact, I wished I could be a woman ... as I walked behind the maid up the staircase, the very thought of exchanging places with her, for however brief an interval, sent an excited tremor through my being, like a flash of dark lightning.”
[ John Banville: ‘You cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense’ ]
The speaker is Evelyn Dolman, the interestingly-named narrator of John Banville’s Venetian Vespers. The year would seem to be about 1900. Dolman is a London literary man of a dismal kind: “I set out to be a lord of language who in time would be placed among the immortals ... Aye, and look what I became: a Grub Street hack.” He is in Venice, city of masks, on his honeymoon. His bride is Laura Rensselaer, daughter of the Gilded Age American plutocrat Thomas Rensselaer. Venice was Laura’s choice; hypergamous Dolman, it seems, does not have much say in the course of his own life. Is he wearing a mask? He makes odd remarks. “An Englishman,” he calls himself, who is “above everything straight: straight of glance, straight of speech, straight of demeanour.” That’s four straights in succession. Our ears, as it were, prick up. Later we learn that at school his nickname was “Dolly”. Hmm.
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Since John Banville killed off his crime-writing pseudonym Benjamin Black a few years ago, the question that hangs over each new Banville novel is: will this one be a Banvillean supreme fiction as of old, or a luxury entertainment of the latter-day Black school? Banville has said that The Singularities (2022) will be his last “serious” novel, and he would perhaps have us categorise Venetian Vespers as, like Snow (2020) or The Lock-Up (2023), an entertainment merely.
Venetian Vespers is certainly a pastiche, of a kind. Banville parodies superbly the perfumed and circumlocutory English prose of the very late 19th century, and compels it to express things that it was in many ways built to avoid expressing – that is, Banville has gone back and put forbidden sexual desires and radical doubts about selfhood into late Victorian prose, generating a distinctly unnerving set of effects. And Venetian Vespers is also a thriller, of the paranoid, is-everyone-conspiring-against-me variety. As such it’s plotted so perfectly that it leaves a cleanly satisfying shape in the mind when it’s over. Not to spoil too much: fleeing his cold wife, Dolman meets in Florian’s a brother and sister, Freddie (like Freddie Montgomery) and the beautiful Cesca, who seem to lure him into ...
But that’s enough of that. Venetian Vespers maps out a territory halfway between Banville’s supreme fictions and his more forthright entertainments. We are recognisably in the moral and aesthetic world of Athena or The Untouchable, here, even as the thriller plot unfolds with sinuous efficiency. Intertexts abound. Henry James is mentioned on page 2, and both The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove lurk significantly between the lines that follow. The book takes place in a highly Jamesian Venice – “this baneful, waterlogged city,” Dolman calls it, “this impossible puzzle of a place.” It might, of course, be Dolman who is the puzzle. Whom does he really want – Cesca or Freddie? “This is Italy,” Cesca coyly reminds him, “where there’s hardly a person who is what he claims to be.”
An intricate thriller that is also a slyly fashioned work of art; a pastiche that is also indisputably the real thing. John Banville, up to his old tricks.
