‘I am by trade a man of letters,’ Evelyn Dolman tells us as the curtain rises on Venetian Vespers. ‘I had a middling reputation in the period coming to be known, in our increasingly Frenchified age, as the fin de siècle, that is, the 1890s.’ If his writing mostly appears in the review sections, his marriage to Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of an American oil baron, is front-page stuff. But Laura has proved to be a distant, phantasmal partner. Even during the Dolmans’ sole night of physical intimacy, ‘it was as if, clasping me to her breast, she were at the same time looking aside and past my shoulder’. It moreover transpires that T. Willard Rensselaer, dead in mysterious circumstances, has cut his daughter out of his will.
John Banville has form in self-pitying, self-pardoning protagonists, and Dolman agrees to a honeymoon in Venice, ‘that pestilential town lodged in the fetid crotch of the Adriatic’, with a sense of sullen heroism. Arriving at their lodgings – the palazzo of the treacherous Count Barbarigo – Dolman looks up at a window and glimpses a woman’s face: ‘I was convinced, in that fleeting moment, that the person, or phantom, looking down at me was someone with whom I was or had been at one time intimately acquainted.’ Someone who rings absolutely no bells is the barfly Freddie FitzHerbert, who yet claims to be an old schoolmate, and whose sister Francesca (‘Cesca’) walks a sotted, besotted Dolman back to the palazzo. Dolman then goes upstairs and rapes Laura.
When he wakes the next morning he finds Laura gone, and the screw begins to turn. Banville charges into the clichés of Venetian-gothic, using his canny choice of narrator to spin sentences perfectly imaginable of a Victorian man of letters:
Yet for all the ease and courtly languor with which the nobleman comported himself, it was plain to me, even in the food- and drink-induced expansiveness of the moment, that the fellow was a charlatan, another player in the hackneyed performance that had been started up for the direct benefit, as it seemed, of my wife and me from the moment we first landed amid the gimcrack magnificence of this.
The characters are all despicable in their own ways, and readers will lose no sleep over Dolman’s unravelling. That said, they will probably stay awake to finish the book.
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