CHRISTINE MANGAN Palace of the Drowned. Reviewed by Airlie Lawson
Christine Mangan weaves a tale of Venice, writers and publishing in her latest novel.
Christine Mangan is the American author of the bestselling and widely praised debut Tangerine, a literary thriller largely set in Tangier in 1956. That book was sold in a seven-figure publishing deal and is set to become a film starring Scarlett Johansson. Palace of the Drowned is her second novel, and opens with a prologue set in October 1966. A woman arrives by train in Rome, where:
… for one mad moment she wondered whether the world might be burning, whether everything that had happened before, everything that she had left behind in the watery grave that Venice had since become, no longer mattered.
Above her, a ‘flock of birds swarmed’ and she compares them to a ‘plague of locusts’. The tone is set. The following page, as she looks at a guard outside the carabinieri station (the Italian words are italicised but rarely translated), she speculates about what he might think of her: ‘an innocent tourist […] or something closer to the truth. A fugitive in a foreign city.’ The question is posed: what has she done?
The first chapter takes the reader back to the month before, to Venice, not yet a ‘watery grave’ but the famed City of Bridges, where summer is over and the tourists have retreated. The woman, Frances – Frankie – Croy is a novelist: mid-list, middle-aged, single. She’s living in a dilapidated palazzo that belongs to her one friend, Jack, whom she expects to join her. She’s not there for inspiration. She’s left London after a humiliating incident provoked by a negative review, one that got under her skin not because the reviewer hated the book: worse, the reviewer was disappointed.
That said, she is writing, frantically scribbling at a table in front of a window that looks out onto a canal. And she’s increasingly confident that this book will not disappoint. But she tells no one. Not her editor, not her friend Jack. No one. Until she meets the young and beautiful Gilly.
From the moment Gilly grabs Frankie’s arm on a bridge, stopping her and claiming they’ve met before, Frankie is suspicious. She is also intrigued. The two become increasingly close – Gilly is insistent despite Frankie’s reluctance – and Gilly introduces Frankie to life in off-season Venice: what to order in a bar; how not to pay tourist prices; a society party. One evening, she even takes Frankie to the opera, where Gilly ‘manages to swing a private box’: the production is Macbeth. Despite spending time together, Frankie’s suspicion doesn’t lift as Gilly’s stories never quite ring true. Except for one, because she provides evidence: Gilly is also a writer. Moreover, Frankie’s publishing house has given Gilly a contract. And now the stage is set: jealousy is introduced. A motive.
Mangan effectively uses the Venetian setting to increase the tension. The city might be beautiful but it’s also a place where it’s easy to get lost, where a ‘dead end […] led only to water’; water with a ‘sulphuric odour’. The palazzo with its ‘impossibly high ceilings’ is cold with intermittent power failures and comes with a housekeeper who speaks no English and looks at Frankie, ‘always with her eyes narrowed and a scowl on her face’, distrusting her. When asked, she denies that there’s anyone living next door, even though Frankie has heard footsteps, seen a figure. And there is, of course, all that water.
If Mangan owes a debt to suspense writers Patricia Highsmith (think Ripley) and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca comes to mind), it’s one readers will likely enjoy. Similarly, those who enjoyed her previous novel will not be disappointed, as Palace of the Drowned applies the same formula: an iconic foreign setting, a recent historical period, a complicated female friendship—and betrayal.
Those interested in publishing will enjoy her depiction of a lost world where editors have more power than marketers, but will also recognise contemporary concerns: books must sell; reviews matter—and can hurt. In Palace of the Drowned, the review at the centre of the story hurts both the reviewed and, ultimately, the reviewer. More than a few authors might enjoy that.
Christine Mangan Palace of the Drowned Little, Brown 2021 PB 384pp $32.99
Airlie Lawson is the Postdoctoral Fellow on ‘Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project’, a Visiting Fellow at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the author of the novel Don’t Tell Eve, a comedy of manners about publishing and the art of revenge.
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