Venice has never been an innocent city in literature. In Nocturne of Venice, John Banville once again turns it into a territory of shadows, desire, and threat. Set in 1899, the novel follows Evelyn Dolman, a second-rate writer, and his wife Laura Rensselaer, an American heiress stripped of her fortune after her father’s death. Settled in the unsettling Palazzo Dioscuri, both become trapped in a web of secrets, suspicions, and impulses that will deteriorate their relationship and, above all, Dolman’s perception of himself. Banville constructs an elegant gothic tale that deliberately draws from Henry James and Thomas Mann: the Anglo-American marriage, the house full of mystery, the ghosts, the eroticism, and that damp, decadent, and almost sickly Venice that seems to have a will of its own. The city does not simply function as a setting but as a presence that progressively contaminates the protagonist’s mind and morals. One of the greatest attractions of the novel lies in its unreliable narrator. Dolman is a mediocre writer, but Banville lends him extraordinarily precise prose, creating an ironic contrast between the vulgarity of the storyteller and the beauty of what we read. It is also here that the Banville closest to Benjamin Black (his alter ego for crime novels) appears: there is mystery, intrigue, and mechanisms typical of detective fiction, although elevated by much more sophisticated writing. Perhaps the plot does not always reach the same height as its language, but Banville once again demonstrates that he masters the art of creating atmospheres like few others. Nocturne of Venice is a disturbing, sensual, and elegant novel, where the true mystery lies not only in what happens but in what desire, guilt, and imagination are capable of making a man believe.
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