I disagree. Not because it’s not wonderful but because he wrote an even better one, A Soldier of the Great War (1991). This too is a kind of fantasy but the time frame is much shorter—basically, the four years of World War I. His experiences in the war are told by Alessandro, now an old man, to a young man with whom he is forced to walk for fifty miles to their destinations, which in the case of the young man is love and in that of the old man, death. Everything that could have happened to any Italian soldier has happened to Alessandro, and he describes it all with a passionate sense of the horror and excitement and beauty that it entailed, especially the story of his falling in love with a nurse in a military hospital. Her name is Ariane and he thinks he has lost her, and if it were not for a painting by Giorgione called “La Tempesta” he might have. The painting is in the Accademia in Venice and I went to see it as soon as I could and discovered why Alessandro tells his young friend that it is “the meaning of all history,” but you will have to read the book and see the painting, even if only in a reproduction, to understand what Helprin evokes. Please take my word, doing so will be worthwhile.
Saying that, I recognize, perhaps for the first time, that you may not share my sense of the meaning of history and the world. However, I hope, if you have gotten this far in this book, that you will try to follow me into my wildly imaginative sense of things. Buona fortuna!
Mark Helprin has won many honors and has also been an adviser to the U.S. and Israeli governments in various capacities and at various times in the past decade. He may be as disappointed with both governments as I am, but for different reasons.
DONNA LEON
1942–
MICHAEL DIBDIN
1947–2007
HENNING MANKELL
1948–
Thrillers
Lest you believe me to be totally square and unaware of the pleasures of popular fiction today, I include in this entry titles by three fine writers whose work I have learned about with the help of my brother, who discovers them before I do and gives me copies on my birthday each year. Curiously, the three authors have much in common; that is, they are all deeply distressed by what is happening today in the worlds they describe but do not actually live in.
The first of the three is Donna Leon, who was born in the United States in 1942 of Irish and Spanish descent. Before settling down in Venice twenty-five years ago, she taught in the United States, Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia—an itinerary that certainly taught her a lot about the way the world works. She published her first thriller, Death at La Fenice, in 1992. It introduced an excellent detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, and his delightful family: his wife Paola and their children, Raffi and Chiara, whom we have seen grow up over the past fifteen years, although perhaps more slowly than you would expect. That doesn’t matter because all of them, thank goodness, are there in every book, together with Sergente Vianello, Brunetti’s right-hand man; Signorina Elletra, who is always beautifully dressed and who can invade any computer system on the planet (or at least in Venice); and Vice-Questore Patta, Brunetti’s “self-serving buffo,” as he has been called.
There is always at least one murder, and it is always very difficult to determine who committed the crime, until the finale. That of course is of the essence of this kind of tale, but what is not of the essence is the deep and growing pessimism not only of Brunetti but also of author Leon, who delves deeper and deeper into the corrupt underbelly of Venice, that glorious “little jewel” built on an island that is slowly but surely sinking into the sea. Certainly Venice has been corrupt for centuries, but the corruption in every sphere of life grows more blatant with every passing year, as the inhabitants abandon the city to the cruise ships whose careless passengers invade it every week or day.
Leon's books are excellent, but I think the best, because the most puzzling, may be Death in a Strange Country, Acqua Alta, Uniform Justice, Doctored Evidence, and the latest, Suffer the Little Children. These cover some twelve or thirteen years and, reviewing the list, I realize how much darker the later ones are than the earlier. That isn’t her fault; it is Venice’s—which doesn’t make it any easier to bear.
The second author is Michael Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in 1947, and grew up in Northern Ireland. The son of a physicist, he studied at Sussex University and at Edmonton University in Canada. He lived for four years in Italy and obviously visited it many times. He died in Seattle in March 2007.
His protagonist is another Italian, also a Venetian, named Aurelio Zen. (Dibdin is careful to point out that this is a Venetian name although it may not sound like one to a non-Venetian.) Zen, as a critic called him, is an “anti-hero” without family except for his aging mother, and only in the last two of his books is seriously involved with a woman, Gemma, whom he finally abandons—why, I don’t know. His first book, Ratking, opens in Rome but ends in Venice, and the other novels range all over the Italian landscape as Zen anti-heroically confronts the Mafia and bravely tries to stand against it, always without success, of course. The villain of Dibdin’s nine or ten Zen novels is not Venetian corruption alone, but the broader underworld power of the Mafia, which continues as it has for several hundred years to strangle the economic and political life of Italy, that jewel of a country built on a small peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea.
The color and tone of these fine novels, from Vendetta, Cabal, and Dead Lagoon, to A Long Finish, Blood Rain, and And Then You Die, grow ever darker as time goes on, and I have the feeling that Dibdin may have been overcome by his hero’s despair before he died. As one who has spent much time during twenty-five years in Italy, I can well understand this, although I have to admit that there are reasons to despair not just in Italy these days.
In Sweden, too, as Henning Mankell, the last of our three entertaining instructors, lets us know. He was born in Stockholm in 1948 and grew up in a cultured family. His career as both author and play director began when he was twenty, and in 1985 he founded the Avenida Theatre in Maputo, Mozambique, where he now spends much of his time and which has provided background for some of his books. In fact, he has spent quite a lot of time in Africa, which hangs like a dark planet over his Swedish world.
Mankell’s protagonist is Inspector Kurt Wallander, who lives and works in Ystad, Sweden. His first thriller was Faceless Killers, the story of some vicious thieves who murder a family in a remote farm house and try to withdraw their money from a bank. You will have to read the book to find out whether they succeed in doing this, but it will not take you long to apprehend Wallander's consciousness of the changes that are occurring in Swedish society, until recently so apparently immune to the social ills we ourselves (and Italians too) know so well. These feelings are accentuated in the succeeding books, which include The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, The Fifth Woman, Firewall, and especially The Dancing Master.