L'ultimo legionario*

A couple of friends went back to the UK yesterday after a ten day visit. They’d come to keep me out of mischief while my wife was visiting our daughter in England. Despite the awful weather we managed to get out and about. For me, the highlight of our excursions was the visit to Fermo. I thought my friends would be interested in seeing the Mappa Mundi and the ancient library which houses it. They were, but they also managed to get us tickets to the Roman cisterns. This is a monument which I’ve always wanted to visit but had never previously managed to.
Built in the reign of Augustus, the huge cisterns supplied water to Porto San Giorgio as well as Fermo. With the collapse of the Empire they fell in to disuse. In the middle ages two of the chambers were rediscovered by Dominican friars and used as a wine cellar. But the really interesting thing comes next. In the nineteenth century the whole complex was rediscovered and re-used as a cistern until the 1980s. But human knowledge and technology have advanced since the days of the Romans. Those primitive people had built huge chambers around twenty feet high but stupidly only allowed the water to fill them to a depth of four feet, the height of the waterproof concrete lining. So modern man being much wiser filled the chambers almost to the top. Oh dear! Too late he discovered that there was a reason for the vast amount of ‘wasted’ space. It had been full of fresh air in the precise proportion, relative to the water, required to keep the latter fresh. Lacking this fresh air, the water stored there in modern times became foul and unfit to drink.
Most people are aware that, years after the end of the Second World War, Japanese soldiers were discovered on remote islands, unaware that the conflict had ended and still preserving their loyalty to the Emperor. Just as Italy has nothing to match the UK in the survival rate of aborted fœtuses, so the Far East cannot equal either the West’s longevity or its devotion to duty. I was able to photograph (see top of page), lurking in the bowels of the cisterns a centurion of Legio XII and inform the startled creature that Romulus Augustulus had been deposed in AD 476, that the Roman Empire was no more and he was therefore free to resign his commission and return home to the bosom of his family. He refused to believe me, adding that even if I were right, who would want to venture out and live in one of the petty squabbling statelets which I’d informed him currently occupy the territory of the Empire. I think he’s probably got a point.

*With apologies to Manfredi.

Protagonists in peril.

The exam board we used in the seventies, when I taught O level English, required its candidates to write, inter alia, a narrative essay. Every year someone would write himself into a corner: telling his story in the first-person and then deciding to kill off the protagonist. I would gently explain that it would be wise to recast the tale in the third-person. ‘O no,’ the authors would always cry triumphantly, ‘ I’ve got the perfect ending: John [or Alice or Ken] will suddenly wake up and discover it was all a dream.’ They were deaf to my declaration that it was the weakest of all possible endings: after all they’d seen it done in Dallas.
If it’s a given that the narrator will survive in a first-person narrative, it’s a basic convention that the main characters in a television series will do so too. A convention that Spooks brilliantly flouts, for much of the excitement of a thriller is lost if you know at the back of your mind that the main character(s) however imperilled will survive. The knowledge certainly detracts from the pleasure I get from reading Diabolik, a monthly Italian crime comic. Since the ‘sixties Diabolik and his partner, Eva Kant, have survived death row several times, and each of them has had to cope, several times, with reports of the other’s death. Like that of Mark Twain the reports are always premature. Unlike the news about Twain, the reader knows that the it must be false: a plug for the next issue is always contained in the comic you’re reading.
When a friend came over in May he was immersed in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. Respecting his literary taste, I bought a copy of the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which both my wife and I enjoyed, and she subsequently bought the remaining two volumes. On Monday she went to the UK, and I read the second volume, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which she’d just finished reading. Very near the end I was brought up short for it seemed that, Lisbeth Salander, one of the two main characters had been killed off. Now as Larsson writes in the third person this in itself presented no problem, merely a shock. The problem lay in the fact that despite having a bullet in her brain and being buried, Salander lives. On the whole it’s better for detective stories to avoid reminding the reader of the story of Christ and the son of the widow of Nain. One can go further: when the story is part of a series featuring the same protagonist, it’s best to avoid trying to convince your reader that the character is about to die. We know that s/he isn’t; far better to save your energy for creating tension and suspense in other aspects of the novel.
Yesterday I began reading Kate Atkinson’s third novel featuring Jackson Brodie, When will there be Good News. Atkinson also inflicts life-threatening injuries on her protagonist, though in his case it's entirely plausible that he recovers from them. Nevertheless considerable space is devoted to his brain’s activity in a near-death state: the white tunnel and an encounter with his long dead sister. One wonders why. Perhaps the book will go on to furnish a reason. I certainly hope so.
In the two Montalbano books published this year Camilleri, as usual, avoids the mistake found in Diabolik, and the stories by Larsson and Atkinson I’ve just referred to. But they were disappointing in other ways. In the first of them, La caccia del tesoro, Montalbano no longer suffers from the respectively ludicrous and repulsive traits he’d had imposed on him in the ante-penultimate and penultimate titles in the series. However the story had the most fundamental flaw of all for a detective story: I was able to guess the identity of the murderer little more than a quarter of the way through the book. The second novel, Acqua in bocca, was written in collaboration with another Italian crime writer, Lucarelli and deals with Montalbano’s involvement in a case with Lucarelli’s protagonist, Grazia Negro. The book consists of correspondence between the two detectives and newspaper items regarding the case. It was disappointing. One feels that Camilleri is merely going through the motions. A pity because the first thirteen Montalbano books were classics of the genre. Camilleri’s well into his eighties: it would have been better if he’d sold his typewriter and remained content with having created a memorable character and masterly plots. His last four novels have only served to muddy his achievement.