Ian Thomson

On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity. On the night of 18 October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo, Palermo, and removed Caravaggio’s Nativity. The altarpiece has not been seen since. Three decades later, in 1996, Italians were aghast when the Mafia claimed responsibility. Somewhere in the Sicilian capital of Palermo, it seemed, a gangland capo sat in awed admiration of the stolen Christmas canvas. Far from submerging rivals in wet concrete, now the Cosa Nostra were enthusiasts of 17th century religious art. Born in 1571 near Milan, Caravaggio was a flammable individual.

In this diverting, well-written history of deceitful and counterfeit literature through the ages, Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis chronicles a variety of fraudsters and fibsters, and their motives for hoodwinking the public. The earliest known literary hoaxer was the philosopher Dionysus the Renegade, who inserted a number of unflattering acrostics — ‘HERACLES IS IGNORANT OF LETTERS AND IS NOT ASHAMED OF HIS IGNORANCE’ — into his trumpery Sophocles play, Parthenopaeus. Dionysus had acted in a spirit of mischief. Recent spoofers have been motivated more by the promise of celebrity. In 2001, Michael Gambino published his bestselling memoir, The Honoured Society, which purported to reveal the ‘innermost workings’ of the American Cosa Nostra.

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white, is precisely evoked by Lawrence Hill, himself a Canadian of mixed-race background.

The Outlander, by Gil Adamson The Outlander, a strikingly good first novel by the Canadian poet Gil Adamson, is a drama of extremity and isolation set in the Rocky Mountains of Canada in the early 1900s. Much of it reads like a pastiche Western with elements of supernatural grotesquerie out of Stephen King or even The X-Files. Turn-of-the-century Alberta is portrayed as a menacing backwater, where settlers are in danger of being scalped by Crow Indians and fur-trappers disembowelled. Into this pioneer territory comes Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old housewife who has just murdered her husband. In physical and emotional disarray, she is on the run from her brothers-in-law, who want her blood in return for the crime committed.

Ian Thomson reviews a collection of Malcolm Lowry's poems, letters and fictions  Malcolm Lowry was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards an early grave with the help of cooking sherry, meths, even bottles of skin bracer. From skid row to bedlam and back, it was a Faustian dissipation. Lowry died in 1957, at the age of 48, from an overdose of barbiturates, having written his epitaph: Malcolm Lowry Late of the Bowery His prose was flowery And often glowery He lived, nightly, and drank, daily, And died playing the ukulele. His reputation rests on one novel only: Under the Volcano (1947). Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, it describes the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-Consul, as he drowns in liquor and despair under the shadow of Popocatepetl.

Not long ago, I was invited to lunch at a plantation home in Jamaica. The sound of cocktail-making (a clinking of crushed ice against glass) greeted me at Worthy Park as bow-tied waiters served the guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of Jamaica’s sugar industry was there, enjoying the French wine and the chilled soursop juice. The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk flies away from our plates. For nearly three centuries the slave-grown sugar of Worthy Park has satisfied the British craving for tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Southey called it), as well as for coffee, cakes and other confections.

Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned 60. His Aurelio Zen mysteries are distinguished by their edgy, convincing police work, mordant dialogue and the picture they give of social unease and mayhem in Italy today. Inspector Zen, a Venice-born policeman, is portrayed as a sternly pensive slogger with health and marital problems, a sort of Mediterranean Inspector Rebus. From his début in Rat King (1989), Zen was in a bad way. He smoked too much, drank excessively and fell into lugubrious talk of his (and Italy’s) demise.

South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first it appears to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. A theme soon emerges, however, as the disparate stories converge. Touted by the publishers (or by the author) as ‘the big British novel of our times’, South of the River opens with Labour’s election victory in 1997 and chronicles the misfortunes of a south London family over a period of five years up to 2002. London south of the river has not been mapped in a novel of this bulk for some time.

At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Time was literally out of joint, but Eliot’s mystico-religious reflections on the nature of the universe might leave me feeling bright and beatifically attuned. I began to read ‘Burnt Norton’, and waited for the visionary moment. It never arrived; instead I was struck by how pretentious the poetry was. Craig Raine, in this pungent critical essay on Eliot, concedes that Four Quartets ‘has it faults’.

Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt in detective fiction today from Scandinavia. The fjords and iron-bound rocks of Norway are part of one’s enjoyment of Karin Fossum, for example, the queen of Norwegian crime, whose thrillers conjure an Ibsenesque atmosphere of shadowy menace. Oddly, for a country which gave us trolls, few mythic cave-dwelling creatures appear in Ibsen’s theatre. (Roald Dahl, whose parents were Norwegian, was enthralled by fictional hags and witches.

In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ he marvelled. No doubt the inmates were supposed to be edified by Dante’s medieval epic of sin and salvation: ghastly retribution is meted out to sinners in the nine circles of Hell. However, if Dante speaks to our present condition, it is not because we fear damnation, but because he wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation. (A more recent sinner, Jeffery Archer, subtitled the three volumes of his prison memoirs ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’.

With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. Sherry set to work in 1976, digging for information like a locker-room snoop. His first, 700-page volume up to 1939 scrutinised Greene’s every depression, love affair and alcoholic spree. ‘Oh why does Sherry waste so much time talking about me?’ Greene grumbled, though secretly, perhaps, he was amused by Sherry’s dedication to the task. He may even have enjoyed the vinous associations of his surname.

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Truman Capote wrote his first fiction at the age of eight. Or so he claimed. Rarely has a writer so elaborated his own legend; not only could Capote make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Drink was no doubt partly to blame. Close friends have described Capote as a ferocious malcontent, free-wheeling to self-destruction with the help of bourbon and barbiturates. The addictions finally got the better of the novelist in 1984, however, when he died of alcohol-related complications; he was a few weeks short of his 60th birthday. Oddly, for such a self-publicist, Capote kept quiet about the novel he wrote at the age of 19, Summer Crossing.

Public visits to the sewers of Vienna are rare: the clammy atmosphere can cause breathing problems. Nevertheless in 1994 I visited them with a local Graham Greene enthusiast, Brigitte Timmer- mann. Greene’s darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the Vienna sewers and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. With his alley-rat amorality, Lime is a familiar Greene character; I wanted to catch a glimpse of his life down a manhole. The sewer entrance by the Stadtpark U-bahn was apparently much as it had been in Greene’s day. (I half expected to see the Austrian police in pursuit of Lime.) As we descended into the darkness I could make out a graffito on the wall: ‘Lime is my favourite fruit.’ I did not see Timmermann again for 12 years.

When Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, Italians were filled with jingoist pride. The dictator triumphantly announced the conquest of the promised sub-Saharan kingdom. ‘He’s like a god,’ marvelled one Fascist. ‘Like a god?’ returned another. ‘He is a god.’ Mussolini was part demagogue, part buffoon; on occasion he wore a tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the world’s cameras. His cult of imperial Rome considered the handshake fey and unhygienic, so the stiff-armed salute was introduced. As the regime strengthened, the high priests of Fascism hailed Mussolini as ‘divine Caesar’, and called for an embargo on all foreign locutions and non-Latin terms.

Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her hair from a cabinet in Milan. Lucrezia’s 16-year correspondence with the Venetian poet and future cardinal Pietro Bembo moved Byron almost to tears: ‘The prettiest love letters in the world,’ he declared. Unusually, Servadio ascribes the birth of the Renaissance to the invention of the printing press in 1456. As a result, books and new ideas were made widely available to women.