Paddling in murky waters

Published in 1995, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was one of those books whose success could be measured by the fact that dozens of people pretended they had read it when they hadn’t. Was this a novel, we wondered, or just snappy reportage with a few names changed and a spot of discreet decorative interference with actuality? Not that it mattered, so enjoyable was the pungent cocktail of murder, voodoo and gender reassignment amid the premier gratin, white or black, of Savannah, Georgia.

Some ten years on, Berendt has attempted a repeat performance in The City of Falling Angels, turning his attention from criminal Dixie to a Europe over whose unregenerate wickedness Americans have lately delighted in tut-tutting. Sin City in this new book is Venice, a place burdened for several centuries with a largely undeserved reputation for decadence and skulduggery. A powerful whiff of the latter nevertheless hangs around the charred remains of Teatro La Fenice, whose destruction by a pair of somewhat hamfisted arsonists is the signal for Berendt to drop his pose as an innocent tourist and trouble the waters of the Grand Canal with a few inconvenient questions.

Penetrating La Serenissima at her smart end — on the piano hobnobile, as it were — he chums up with the Lauritzens, hits the carnival scene in Palazzo Pisani Moretta and schmoozes among Golden Book aristocracy, bagging a Marcello, a Loredan and a Foscari along the way. Evidently they are no more inclined than we to accept his presence in the city as purely coincidental. Their obiter dicta on family pride, on the inability of Venetians to tell the truth or on the ownership of the doge’s box at La Fenice are dispensed with calculated nonchalance, nourishing scraps to appease Berendt’s hunger for copy.