The Girl From Venice - Martin Cruz Smith

The Girl From Venice is Cruz Smith's latest, the successor to Tatiana, which I recently reviewed here. It is a very different kettle of fish (excuse pun - it's about a fisherman). Set during the strange period between the Allied invasion of Italy and the Nazi departure. Venice, scrupulously unbombd by either side, delineates the boundary between.


Cenzo is the middle of three brothers, a fisherman from one of the poorer islands in the lagoon where fishermen live. His older brother Giorgio is a movie star, a Mussolini favourite, the so-called Lion of Tripoli. Younger brother Hugo was drowned during what may have been the only airborne attack on Venice. One might Cenzo fishes a young girl out of the water. He thinks she is dead but she's not. She is Guilia, daughter of Jewish academics. The Nazis are searching everywhere because she holds a secret.


Cenzo eventually arranges for her to be smuggled to safety. This is where the book loses momentum. Cenzo is too determinedly ordinary to be our hero. He only comes alive when Guilia is around. Fortunately he finds her again for what is to all intents and purposes Act Three, but it has to be said Act Two is a bit of a slog, albeit the flamboyant Giorgio livens it up from time to time. The ending is good and I enjoyed reading about Mussolino's bolt hole in the wonderfully named Salo. I'm assuming this is historic fact because Cruz Smith is so damned good at research. He writes pretty well too. He has decided to soak this story in fisherman lore and tweaks his prose accordingly, successfully. Events rapidly become myths - superstitions are made into plot points.


Overall then, an enjoyable read, sufficiently off-beat to hold our attention when poor old Cenzo doesn't quite manage to.

Private Angelo - Eric Linklater

Is Angelo Linklater's masterpiece?  It may well be.  Arguments can be made for the two Don Juan novels, and some of his books for children are classics in their own right, but I suspect Angelo is the one that will count.

Written in 1945 and published in 1946, Angelo was Linklater's first novel since immediately before the outbreak of war.  This was not because of block but because Linklater was a genuine war hero.  Shot in the head in World War 1, by the time Chamberlain made the war broadcast on September 3 1939 Linklater was already on active duty guarding Scapa Flow.

Within a few months the famous novelist had been seconded to the Ministry of Information, for whom he produced the official history of significant battles, all of them glorious defeats.  This led him to collaborate on radio versions with the BBC which in turn led to his famous series of dramatic 'conversations' which were tremendously popular and upon which I appear to be the world expert.

The last conversation was Rabelais Replies in 1943.  Linklater then returned to active service, based in Italy between the Italian surrender and the Allied clearance of the Germans from Italy.  This is the period in which the bulk of Angelo is set.

Angelo is the soldierly everyman, good-hearted and dutiful enough but lacking the dono di corragio.  As with all moralities, from Everyman itself to Pilgrim's Progress, his adventures lead to him finding that which he started out lacking.  All of it is done with Linklater's characteristic humour - he is a comic novelist in the tradition of Dickens and Compton Mackenzie.  But much as Linklater admired the fighting man, he absolutely loathed the political nincompoops who led the world into war.  And he says so, several times.  Passages here reflect the tone of his first and best radio conversation The Cornerstones (1941).

I can't pretend I like The Cornerstones when I skimmed through it nine or ten years ago.  Since then I have discovered and anatomised Linklater's radio work, learned about his impressive life, measured his considerable literary achievement and come to love some of his novels.  That absolutely includes Private Angelo, which should be on every school syllabus instead of puffed-up guff from writers who weren't there and didn't understand.