JOHN BANVILLE Venetian Vespers. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell

Set in Venice in 1899, John Banville’s new novel blends crime and the gothic as it skewers literary pretension.

From 2006 to around 2020, Irish novelist John Banville began publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. The Man Booker Prize winner (and perennial Nobel favourite) stepped aside from his more literary novels to make room for the prolific, crowd-pleasing Black. His Quirke novels, set in 1950s Dublin, have gone on to become bestsellers and have been adapted for television. It’s never been entirely clear why Banville eventually decided to give Black early retirement, but since 2020 he has been publishing both crime and literary fiction under his own name.

Venetian Vespers is a curious hybrid of crime thriller, noir and gothic horror. It’s set in 1899, the twilight years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and Evelyn Dolman, the book’s narrator, a pompous would-be literary lion, has just married the beautiful but enigmatic Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of a wealthy American railroad tycoon.

Dolman’s puffed-up self-importance makes him the perfect patsy for what comes next. Despite the late Victorian setting, he shares a lot with the kind of morally compromised chumps and losers that lovers of classic noir may recognise from James M Cain’s 1930s novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The other difference, of course, is that Banville’s lurid creation is a writer, a self-deluded scribe whose comeuppance is a delight to witness.

I set out to be a lord of language who in time would be placed among the immortals. Mayhew? A midget. Shaw? Pshaw! As for that whoremaster Wells, don’t get me started. No, my targets were the mighty beasts of the literary jungle, the Henry Jameses, the George Eliots, the Conrads and the Hardys and the Ford Madox Fords. Not to mention the Flauberts and the Tolstoys. Not to mention the Shakespeares! There was no literary giant whose mighty shoulders my ambition would not o’ervault, no polished pard whose eye my pen, that steely poignard, would not pierce.

Of late, Dolman has become ‘a Grub Street hack’, knocking out travel guides to the cathedral cities of the south of England. Banville’s mastery of the first-person voice is such that it only takes a few early passages to convey not only Dolman’s limitations as a writer, but also the extent of his blind self-regard and craven character:

National newspapers regularly commissioned pieces from me, not always of a lightweight nature. There was talk briefly of my being sent to the Cape Colony to report on the war like intentions of the Boer, but I thought it prudent not to expose my person to the Anglophobia of those trigger-happy settlers, especially as the commissioning paper was the Sheffield Evening Herald, and the fee would have been commensurate with its provinciality and its modest circulation figures.

As something of a sweetener for getting engaged, Laura’s father contracts Dolman to write his biography, promising a ‘lavish’ fee for his efforts. If it all seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Shortly after their marriage, Dolman’s new father-in-law dies unexpectedly, after which Dolman discovers that his bride has been disinherited. But as forcefully and unpleasantly as Dolman presses Laura to divulge details of the rift that caused her father to change his will, she remains tight– lipped.

The couple arrive in Venice for a belated honeymoon, and it is here that Banville’s mastery of atmosphere and foreboding is deployed to full effect inside their damp, crumbling palazzo and around the city’s dark and byzantine streets:

It was evening when we arrived in Venice. Sure enough, on emerging from the railway station we found, as I had grimly anticipated, the gathering darkness draped with a dismal, freezing mist, in which the gas lamps along both stone banks of the canal glowed like the puff-ball heads of dandelions.

Dolman takes no pleasure in the tattered, decaying city with its ‘putrid, jade-green waters’. He doesn’t speak the language and regards its ‘slithering’ inhabitants as no more than a collection of tricksters, liars and voluptuous harlots. Not to mention how unsettled he is by a mysterious, ghostly figure who appears to haunt the secret compartments of the rambling palazzo they’re renting. Meanwhile Laura’s ease with the locals and fluency in Italian underscores his own provinciality, not to mention a fatal lack of curiosity about his bride:

In the time that I had been married to her, there had been a number of occasions, and this was another one of them, when I felt I had been afforded an unintentional glimpse of another version of my wife, a version quite different from the familiar one that I thought I knew.

He also barely knows Laura in the physical sense. At the novel’s rotten heart is Dolman’s own repressed late Victorian sexuality and his twisted, cruel misogyny. The world around him is beginning to change and a new century dawns. Meanwhile he remains trapped in the past as much as the decaying city he comes to detest. John Banville’s Evelyn Dolman isn’t the kind of protagonist to test his readers’ sympathy. On the other hand, Venetian Vespers is such a darkly humorous and beautifully wrought period piece, that it doesn’t really matter. The story unfolds so effortlessly, and Banville’s prose is so arch and chillingly atmospheric, that it’s just fun to be along for the ride.

John Banville Venetian Vespers Faber 2025 PB 368pp $34.99

Naomi Manuell is a Melbourne writer. She won the Melbourne Athenaeum Library Award for best ‘body in the library’ story at the 2024 Sisters in Crime Scarlett Stiletto Awards.

You can buy Venetian Vespers from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Benjamin Black, crime fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, Irish fiction, John | Banville, literary pretension, Venetian honeymoon