fictional cities :: related works

This is the page for novels with themes and authors you'll find on the main pages,
but which are not set in Venice, Florence or London.
The concept of both having a cake and eating it springs to mind, does it not?

Dutch Art
There was a sudden rash of Dutch art related novels as the last millennium ended.
The Vermeer-era dominates.

Tracy Chevalier
Girl with a pearl earring
Harper Collins 1999
This novel attempts to tell us the story behind Vermeer's mysterious painting of the same name, and to provide us with a believable life for a man we know very little about. The girl is Griet, who comes to work for the Vermeers as a maid to help her own family's fortunes after the accidental blinding of her father. She falls under the spell of Vermeer and his art and we share in her wonder. Vermeer himself is kept a somewhat shady figure, whilst life in Delft is the bright foreground. It's a pretty convincing picture, painted by a novelist who's here getting more than her money's worth out of the annual fee on her poetic license. Nice film too.

Michael Frayn Headlong Faber 1999
In which a man gets well out of his depth and just about escapes with his life. An academic couple take their baby, which they've named after a brand of rice for some reason, down to their country cottage and take time off to get a little writing done. An invite from the local land-owner to dinner, in his cold and damp pile with his hot and unhappy wife, and his post-prandial invitation to his guests to give their informed opinions on a couple of old paintings, sets in motion a semi-farcical, semi-surprising roller coaster of art and greed and confused intentions. Our hero, the husband, thinks that one of the paintings is a long lost Brueghel, you see - one of the lost episodes in his cycle of the seasons - and he also thinks that he can get the painting, and the glory of its discovery, for himself. The subsequent shenanigans are a hook upon which is hung much Brueghel scholarship and, quite frankly, I ended up caring more about Brueghel than the characters in the book. But it grips, eventually, and informs, and the characters have a warm believability, at times.

Deborah Moggach Tulip fever Heinemann 1999
A novel dealing with the three most famous aspects of the Dutch
Golden Age - art, money and tulips. The elderly husband speculates in tulip bulbs (a commodity with which fortunes could then be made) whilst he and his wife are having their portrait painted, and she is having secret sex with the artist. It would make a nice change to read a novel where the wife of a boorish young artist finds love and orgasms in the arms of a sensitive elderly merchant, but this is still an involving re-telling of a timeless tale.

Andrew Martin
The Blackpool Highflyer
faber 2004
Jim Stringer has returned back up North, with his new wife, and now works on the Lanky - the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Working as a train fireman he becomes obsessed by an attempt at sabotage on an excursion train to Blackpool which leads to the death of a woman and much guilt for out hero. As before the plot, though involving, is secondary to the atmosphere and real lives, with much texture provided by details of railway and mill life and the sparkling joy of holidays and the resorts. The touching depiction of the changing lives, and oddball characters, in the music halls will stick in your memory too. An involving book full of real human beings and humanity.

The Lost Luggage Porter
faber 2006
For this third outing Jim Stringer has been dubbed The Steam Detective and all three books now come in uniform covers decked out with suitable Victorian ephemera. Having been sacked after the events of the last book, and feeling none too good about it, this book sees our hero starting a new job as a railways detective in York. Being a fresh face he's an ideal choice to go undercover and find out what the big job is that's afoot. I found this one a little less pacey and involving than the first two: it wanders around Victorian York a little too much, admiring the period details. It does the job, though - coming to a satisfyingly twisty and messy conclusion - just not quite as well as previously.

David Lodge Author, author
It's the subject of this novel who counts as featured here rather than the author. This is the third novel published in 2004 to deal with the life of Henry James. Here it's a relatively straightforward fictionalised account of his middle years, his relationship with George DuMaurier (who shares my birthday, by the way) and his confidence-crushing forays into writing for the theatre. The action is mainly set in London and England, but there are visits to Florence and, of course, Venice. The topographical is not important here though. Henry shows Florence to Constance Fenimore Woolson, so inspiring a short story and her love. This is never consummated and HJ, we are told, never experiences the act of consummation with anyone, male or female, in his whole life. This fact may be hard to believe, but his life and character makes it seem less so. There are many delightfully waspish exchanges between HJ and Miss Woolson in this novel, but she ends her own life tragically in Venice, with our hero's lack of expressed love for her maybe a major factor. I was left wanting to know more about her, which lead to this page. The centre of the book, though, is HJ's relationship with DuMaurier and his family. It presents them as the suppliers of the most necessary human hub in his life and puts them at the centre of the social and professional whirl of his later life. DuMaurier was an influential cartoonist for Punch - he drew the famous one (right) about the curate's egg that coined the phrase - and went on to write novels when his eyesight failed him. Foremost amongst these is Trilby, the biggest selling international fiction phenomenon ever, in its day, and the inspiration for cash-in items like sausages and hats. To say that Henry James was not unconditionally happy for his friend is a considerable understatement. You'll finish the book a little saddened for the man, who never really lost himself to another human being, and who never knew how fully, indeed excessively, his artistic ambitions were to be realised decades after his death.

Colm Tóibín The Master
Another of the 2004 Henry James glut, this one's a warmer and more moving read, so maybe less appropriate to its subject, you'd think, but I think not. It deals again with his later years and so covers much the same ground as the above. It differs, though, by trying to get at HJ's emotions, his feelings following the deaths of close family and friends that haunted his later life, especially Miss Woolson's, and how these events shaped his work. Tóibín puts this latter relationship at the core of the novel as the crucial one of the man's life. A convincing argument, and a truly moving portrait of a couple in need of their solitude and of each other too. It remains a mystery, though, whether Constance's withdrawal was a reaction to Henry's coolness and timidity or a symptom of her own need. It seems to me she was doing what she needed to do to preserve their relationship, but it's a moot point. The scene where Henry, trying to avoid the scene of Constance's suicide in Venice but finding himself lost and drifting towards it, stops and addresses her ghost, so strong for him there, will bring a tear to the most male eyes. A moving and involving read, as you may have noticed.

TRUE HUMILITY (also known as The Curate's Egg)
Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!"
The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you ! Parts of it are excellent!"

Alan Hollinghurst The line of beauty
The third in this sequence was not about Henry James in any real sense, it just featured a central character whose only real work was on his post-grad thesis on the author. The fact that he's gay, and that the book deals with the kind of rampant sexuality so alien to HJ, might constitute a link. But really this is more a dissection of the hedonistic 80s, power, privilege and friendship. It's a fine book, more feeling than the Lodge and running the Tóibín a close second, but not Jamesian in any overt sense, although that's what it's said to be..

Timothy Williams Big Italy
Gollancz 1996
Political and police corruption mix with sexual intrigue, as is far from unusual in crime novels set in Italy, as noted above. This one is even more labyrinthine than usual, but quite stately in pace, so following it's not hard. It stands apart by having a central character, Commissario Trotti, who falls into neither of the staple crime novel detective moulds - he's neither a cosily contented father, nor a tortured bachelor with an artistic obsession. He's separated from his wife, grouchy as hell, on the verge of retirement, and strangely lovable. His warming relationship with a woman who works with him with abused children is believable and touching too. A fine, involving and subtle book.

I for one would like to read more Trotti novels, if you would too then click here

The Da Vinci Code
It took me a while to get around to reading this one. Those nice Amazons spotted it as something I might like, based on past purchases, and they seemed spot on. But a couple of correspondents damned it as low-brow, and I believed them. And how could I not, when the title makes that big old dumb mistake of calling the artist Da Vinci? (It's not his surname, it just refers to where he's from.) Later a couple more respected friends, book-taste wise, recommended it and I thought I'd give it a go. And to say that I was not disappointed is a huge understatement - I was as gripped as everyone else. It's a supremely effective - if not particularly well-written - thriller with smart background and some convincing historical conspiracy detailing. It is less influenced by usually stately art-crime novels than it is by a couple of my favourite TV series of recent years. It has the menace and all-in-one-long-day grip of 24, mixed with the dark conspiracies and obsession with renaissance geniuses of Alias. It's all expertly paced and plotted, with well-timed shocks and some convincingly warm and hatefully cold humans. The basic premise of Mary Magdalene being Jesus' wife and bearing him a child is taken from a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, even the authors of which now admit is full of ages-old conjecture rather than researched fact. It's all tosh, then, but entertaining tosh. And now there's a film, which stars Tom Hanks with some truly bad hair, but Audrey Tautou too, so my emotions are mixed again.

And I liked it so much I read Angels and demons too, the previous adventure of Robert Langdon, and it's pretty much the same gripping recipe - a 24-hour roller coaster of tension, conspiracy and murder. This time it's the Illuminati, an ancient society of anti-religious scientists out for revenge for centuries of persecution at the hands of the Catholic church. Or so it seems. This one keeps you guessing with its good and evil switchbacks all the way, and you just can't stop reading. It also presents lots of arcane knowledge in digestible form, and takes us through the science vs. religion conflict in many conversations and monologues. It takes us around Rome and the Vatican too, and makes you want to go back and check out those churches again. Bernini is the featured artist in this one and again you find yourself wondering about the fact/fiction divide. My confidence was a little dented by the book telling us that the BBC headquarters in London is West of Piccadilly Circus - if this minor piece of easily-checkable fact wasn't can we trust the rest? Well, it's hard not to be caught up in the facts as well as the action, and that's the trick - appealing to the senses and the mind. But two's enough now - I don't think I'll be reading another.

Michael Dibdin And then you die
Faber 2002
Michael Dibdin it was who started me on this Italian-set crime novel thing with his Aurelio Zen novels. It's more than a bit strange, therefore, that he doesn't feature on the main pages of this site. There are two reasons for this. The first is the fact that his novels set in Venice and Florence are only two. The second is that I read them many years ago, and my memory is so bad I can only write reviews immediately after reading. So, here's his newest which, like most of his novels, is not set in Venice or Florence; although Zen does pass through Florence in the early morning, and visits the market. He got seriously blown up by the Mafia in the last book Blood rain, and so it's with relief that we find him alive and convalescing on the Tuscan coast. He's got a false name and a court in America's expecting him to identify some bad men. His disposition following his long months in hospitals, and the recent death of his mother, is not the sunniest however. But a flirtation with an attractive woman on the next beach lounger, and the fact that on the next lounger in the other direction a corpse is catching some superfluous rays, warms things up for our hero more than somewhat. This is a slim novel of characters, rather than plot twists, even if things do turn around a bit towards the end. You care, and root for, Aurelio even when events border on the farcical.

Back to Bologna Faber 2005
And if you thought that the book above bordered on the farcical... this one has upset a lot of fans by being even broader, but I enjoyed it. I think that Mr D is trying to spice up his writing and make this book a bit more knockabout and modern. He does a good job but in the process he sacrifices some of the tension and, well, seriousness he's known for. Look out for characters called Brunetti and Guarnaccia too - names cheekily nicked from the novels of the Ms's Leon and Nabb.

End games Faber 2007
Aurelio Zen is posted to a town in the depths of Calabria. He hates the food and the locals are suspicious, but respectfully fearful, of his unpredictability. When a lawyer working for a film company that is ostensibly intending to make a film about the End Times in the area is kidnapped our man at last has some juicy work to do. When the lawyer turns up with his head blown to mush in an abandoned hilltop town before a ransom is demanded things turn decidedly non-standard. Dibdin has lots of fun with Zen's detailed disgust with the local cuisine, the diseased geek-speak of the Microsoft millionaire running the show, and Zen's local team's shockingly slick surveillance methods. Each chapter is written in the voice of the character from whose point of view it's written, which is very entertaining too. A joy to read, all in all, and a fine and fitting end.