Review: "Venetian Vespers," John Banville

Set at the close of the 19th century, Venetian Vespers drops us into a wintry Venice seen through the jaundiced eyes of its narrator, English writer Evelyn Dolman. He arrives with his wife Laura—an American heiress, recently disinherited after a mysterious rupture with her father—to inhabit a cavernous palazzo on the Grand Canal, a wedding gift that now feels less like a blessing than a trap.

From the outset, Dolman loathes Venice: the cold, the smell, the sense of rot beneath the beauty. He cynically describes the city’s decaying foundations as “the soiled and drenched hems of the petticoats of a succession of dropsical old ladies.” To him, Venice is not a postcard. It’s sinister; the city seems to smirk at him.  The supporting cast deepens the unease: the coarse and unsettling Count Barbarigo, their landlord; the ambiguous maid Rosaria (servant? relative? accomplice? If so, to what?). Meanwhile, Dolman’s suspects that he may have been a consolation prize after Laura’s father blocked an unsuitable match.

Dolman quickly encounters Freddie FitzHerbert, a boarding-school acquaintance Dolman does not remember and immediately distrusts, and Freddie’s sister Francesca, whose allure proves far more destabilizing. When Laura vanishes and the FitzHerberts insinuate themselves into the palazzo, Dolman’s tenuous grasp on reality begins to fray. He knows he’s being sucked into a bizarre rabbit hole—and yet he doesn’t really try to save himself.

The story is dark and claustrophobic, with more than a trace of Poe in its atmosphere and moral ambiguity. Dolman is very much an anti-hero: vain, unreliable, passive, and complicit in his own undoing. And yet he is compelling precisely because of these flaws.

John Banville is a masterful writer, and his exquisite precision and sensuality are on full display here. Grim, yes—but deliciously so. I devoured it.