"Many years ago, a sober-minded friend warned me off going to Venice for the first time with my then partner. He muttered ominous things about the Venice wobble and the Venice curse. I went anyway and I have to say he had a point. It was autumn and there was something deeply uncanny about the city: fog-bound canals, labyrinthine alleyways, a general sense of decay. If my minibreak had belonged to a literary genre, it wouldn't have been romance so much as cosmic horror."
"Fiction, of course, should have prepared me. Couples have been coming unstuck in Venice since Othello and Desdemona. There are the Baxters in Daphne du Maurier's short story Don't Look Now, the basis for Nicolas Roeg's unforgettably creepy film; Mary and Colin in The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan the city's not named in the novel, but it's clearly the setting. And while the love affair in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice exists only in Von Aschenbach's mind, the city is still his undoing."
"To Von Aschenbach and the others, we can now add the name of the unfortunate Evelyn Dolman, the protagonist of John Banville's new novel, Venetian Vespers. Evelyn is a hack writer from England who has recently married an American heiress called Laura Rensselaer. Their plans to honeymoon in Venice have been delayed by the unexpected death of Laura's father, the industrialist T Willard Rensselaer."
A personal warning about Venice frames an account of the city's uncanny, decaying atmosphere: fog-bound canals, labyrinthine alleys and a sense of cosmic dread rather than romance. Literary precedents are named where couples unravel in Venice, including Othello, Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now, Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. John Banville's Venetian Vespers adds Evelyn Dolman, an English hack writer newly married to American heiress Laura Rensselaer, whose delayed honeymoon in a sinister palazzo near St Mark's leads to twin-driven misfortune and Evelyn's narrated downfall.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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