Venetian Vespers
Venice, 1899: Evelyn Dolman and Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon, travel to Venice for their lengthy but delayed honeymoon. In the months leading up to their journey, Evelyn has a disturbing recurring dream that he associates with the lagoon city he is yet to see. Evelyn in his own words is a ‘Grub Street hack’; he has been commercially successful with a series of county guides but wanted to be in the league of Henry James or Joseph Conrad – if not Tolstoy.
This chip on his shoulder follows him into his marriage; why does Laura want to marry him, he wonders, and not some English noble, no matter how impoverished? The two set out from a London reminiscent of a John Atkinson Grimshaw night scene for the dank, almost empty chambers of the decaying Palazzo Dioscuri. Here Evelyn encounters a cast of sinister eccentrics: his flamboyant but seedy landlord the Count Barbarigo, a grotesque maggiordomo and a pert and knowing chambermaid. Stumbling out to Florian’s, he is latched onto by a wheedling con man who claims an acquaintance from schooldays but whom Evelyn cannot remember at all, and the con man’s beautiful, cloying sister, with whom he rapidly becomes infatuated. But how is it that these strangers know so much about him? Then Laura disappears and Evelyn increasingly believes that he is being gulled, though he doesn’t quite know how, much less (until considerably later) why.
This tour de force of a novel has all the creeping menace of The Turn of the Screw and also has echoes of My Cousin Rachel but is most remarkable for the consistency of its first-person voice, reading not only as though it is set in 1899 but as if it was written then.
