My wife returned from England yesterday. Apart from painting shutters, sawing up tree branches and weeding the courtyard I spent my time reading Camilleri’s latest Montalbano novel: La danza del gabbiano [The Dance of the Seagull].
Camilleri is now well into his eighties and, I fear, his powers are starting to decline like those of so many people at that stage of life. His previous novel, L’età del dubbio [The Age of Doubt], despite being well plotted, had a serious weakness. His protagonist, Montalbano, became involved with a staggeringly beautiful Lieutenant of the Customs Service, Laura Belladonna, more than twenty years his junior. Nothing unusual there as both life and art teach us - though such things usually end in tears: The Merchant’s Prologue and Tale and Paul and Heather McCartney spring to mind. What didn’t ring true was the fact that it was Laura who was obsessed with Montalbano, rather than vice versa, having to struggle to overcome her longing to consummate their relationship. After Montalbano tries unsuccessfully to save her life she dies with his name on her lips. A trip to the beach with my younger daughter a couple of years ago taught me that in real life young women do not find the sight of the semi-naked flesh of the aging male an attractive sight. ‘Oh, Father!’ she exclaimed with disgust as I appeared in my bathing trunks!
Maybe Camilleri was trying to exorcise some demon in his private life, depicting things as he wished they could have been rather than as they were. Dickens did something similar in Oliver Twist, the young Rose Maylie returning from the brink of death after a sudden illness: his seventeen year old sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth with whom he was in love, had died suddenly and unexpectedly whilst he was writing the novel. And Great Expectations transmutes his troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, twenty-five years his junior, into that of Pip and Estella, class difference being substituted for age difference. Discrepancy in age is dealt with directly, and given a happy resolution, in the marriage of Jo and Biddy, whilst the revised ‘Bulwer-Lytton’ ending to the novel, with the subdued beauty of its evocation of the closing lines of Paradise Lost, tentatively points to a future together for Pip and Estella. My point, dear reader, is that in Great Expectations, Dickens exemplifies Eliot’s analogy of the creative process being a catalyst:
‘… the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material …’
In Oliver Twist, an early work, Dickens did not, and neither has Camilleri.
The problems with La danza del gabbiano are different. Once again, a young woman features in Montalbano’s life, but he is aware from the beginning that she is a honey-trap and though attracted to her doesn’t suffer from the illusion that the feeling is mutual. What doesn’t gell, though, is the way Montalbano behaves to make Angela confess to her involvement in the plot to entrap him. He puts pressure on her by making her strip naked and pretending he is about to rape her. Perhaps more than most fictional detectives, Montalbano is a thoroughly decent man. In any previous novel, the measures he adopts here - those of the American troops who sexually abused and humiliated their Iraqi captives in an attempt to extract confessions - would have horrified and disgusted him. One can only conclude that Camilleri was writing the scene, with one hand on the keyboard and the other inside his pants, to save the cost of that week’s supply of viagra.
The other problem is one of form. In Il campo del vasaio [The Potter’s Field] - see my blog dated 4th March - Camilleri has the nice conceit of Montalbano getting the inspiration to solve the crime he is working on from reading one of the author’s historical novels - one which doesn’t feature Montalbano. That worked. In contrast, the opening chapter of La danza del gabbiano has Montalbano avoiding a trip to Val di Noto with his partner, Livia, because they might run into the television crew filming one of Camilleri’s Montalbano’s novels! He even complains that the actor who plays him is bald - and in real life the actor, Zingaretti, is - whilst he himself has plenty of hair. Such dislocations of form rarely work. Even in A Handful of Dust, in many ways a great novel, they don’t. According to his biographer, Sykes, Waugh is trying to make the point that civilisation is a thin layer of ice through which we can easily fall. True, but in Gulliver’s Travels the point is formally embodied with consummate skill; in A Handful of Dust it’s done awkwardly leaving the reader confused. As for Camilleri, I’ve no idea what he’s trying to do. There are references within the novel to Montalbano being a quixotic figure, and in the second part of Don Quixote the protagonist, as the reader will recall, does meet the false Don Quixote from an unauthorised sequel to Part One. But La danza del gabbiano is a detective story, for God’s sake, not a novel by Umberto Eco. The conceit merely undermines the realism essential to that genre without adding any compensatory value.
Apparently Camilleri has written a Montalbano story to be published posthumously. As it was written some time ago, I guess it will be good and I look forward to reading it. But any further stories written between now and the author’s death are likely to be a disappointment
