There is a deal of decadent glamour in her now novel, but little to sustain the reader. Set in Venice and Umbria in the early days of the Risorgimento, The Palace is an extended fantasy narrated by Gabriele del Campo, a peasant whom Fate and political upheaval turn into a patrone
The novel opens in a Vatican gaol. Gabriele, a mercenary soldier fighting for Garibaldi, finds himself shackled to Vitalli, a high-minded colonel of noble birth. Reprieved, by pure freak, from the firing squad, Gabriele reinvents himself in Vitelli’s image.
As well as lessons in etiquette, ethics and deportment, Vitelli teaches his protege to play cards. In return Gabriele, a stone-mason by trade, gives Vitelli a guided tour of the splendid imaginary palace he has built to keep himself sane in captivity. Liberated at last by the victorious redshirts, Gabriele seeks the fortune he requires to build his palace in the gaming rooms of Venice.
St Aubin de Tern’s Venice is a place of unrelieved fever and fret, rotting piles on a lagoon stiff with submerged horrors. “The heart was dying,” reports Gabriele, “the lungs wheezed, the blood oozed round the ancient body. Where the mud and the sewage blocked veins completely, life began to stagnate. The ague victims were lowered from windows and bundled into boats.”Soon, however, our narrator develops a sophisticated taste for corruption.
“I viewed her [Venice] first as a bartender might view an ageing courtesan and then discovered gradually that, despite the garish paint and the peeling make-up, the shredding silk of her gown and the musty smell of her ancient flesh, she still had more wit and spirit than many a pretty girl and that she had a perfume of her own, an essential oil of sensuality which was lost in the artifice unless you were very near.”The prose is lush and occasionally lovely, but quite soon the reader, floundering in essential oils and eloquence, becomes quite desperate for a story-line. When Gabriele finally quits Venice to build his palace in Umbria and capture the heart of the young noblewoman he loves from afar, hopes are raised, but plot seems to be the last thing on the author’s mind. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons that Rushdie assigns significance to Anita Desai’s exquisite novel In Custody. Desai chose English as a via media between the many languages she spoke, but wrote about an Urdu poet and the dying glories of a passing, pre-colonial tradition in a materialistic, post-national era. Unfortunately, the story chosen here doesn’t match her finest work.English serves South Asian writers well. Many of us who live abroad choose to use it for the liberties of communication it affords, in spite of the constraints of expression it might impose.