{"id":58669,"date":"2025-10-03T05:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T05:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/58669\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T05:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T05:29:06","slug":"an-intricate-thriller-and-a-slyly-fashioned-work-of-art-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/58669\/","title":{"rendered":"An intricate thriller and a slyly fashioned work of art \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Venetian Vespers <\/p>\n

Author: John Banville<\/p>\n

ISBN-13: 978-0571386635<\/p>\n

Publisher: Faber & Faber <\/p>\n

Guideline Price: \u00a316.99<\/p>\n

Writing in 1882, Henry James complained that \u201cThere is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject.\u201d The subject, in this case, was Venice, the endlessly depicted city. Venice, James wrote, \u201cscarcely exists anymore as a city at all … she exists only as a battered peep show and bazaar.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2019s most perfect novellas, The Aspern Papers (1888). A nameless literary man suspects that a cache of letters by the late poet Jeffrey Aspern (\u201che hangs high in the heaven of our literature\u201d) moulders away in the \u201csequestered and dilapidated\u201d Venetian palazzo of the elderly Miss Bordereau, who was in her youth Aspern\u2019s lover, or so rumour has it. The literary man schemes and charms his way into the palazzo, and …<\/p>\n

Henry James\u2019s fictional Venice is like everybody else\u2019s fictional Venice: a city of masks and secret desires. \u201cVenice is the world\u2019s unconscious,\u201d suggested Mary McCarthy in 1956, and writers have always seemed to find it so: think of Thomas Mann\u2019s Aschenbach, expiring in a chaste Liebestod as he watches Tadzio frolic on a Lido beach. And what are we to make of this: \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0John Banville: \u2018You cannot censor me. They would try it now with all this wokeist nonsense\u2019<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The speaker is Evelyn Dolman, the interestingly-named narrator of John Banville\u2019s Venetian Vespers. The year would seem to be about 1900. Dolman is a London literary man of a dismal kind: \u201cI 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cAn Englishman,\u201d he calls himself, who is \u201cabove everything straight: straight of glance, straight of speech, straight of demeanour.\u201d That\u2019s four straights in succession. Our ears, as it were, prick up. Later we learn that at school his nickname was \u201cDolly\u201d. Hmm. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cserious\u201d novel, and he would perhaps have us categorise Venetian Vespers as, like Snow (2020) or The Lock-Up (2023), an entertainment merely. <\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s plotted so perfectly that it leaves a cleanly satisfying shape in the mind when it\u2019s over. Not to spoil too much: fleeing his cold wife, Dolman meets in Florian\u2019s a brother and sister, Freddie (like Freddie Montgomery) and the beautiful Cesca, who seem to lure him into … <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s enough of that. Venetian Vespers maps out a territory halfway between Banville\u2019s 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 \u2013 \u201cthis baneful, waterlogged city,\u201d Dolman calls it, \u201cthis impossible puzzle of a place.\u201d It might, of course, be Dolman who is the puzzle. Whom does he really want \u2013 Cesca or Freddie? \u201cThis is Italy,\u201d Cesca coyly reminds him, \u201cwhere there\u2019s hardly a person who is what he claims to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Venetian Vespers Author: John Banville ISBN-13: 978-0571386635 Publisher: Faber & Faber Guideline Price: \u00a316.99 Writing in 1882, Henry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-58669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}