Book Review

Dibdin, Michael (1994).  ‘Dead Lagoon’

By Derryll White

The Dead Lagoon brackets Venice, Italy.  It is in fact an extension of the Adriatic Sea, with Venice the jewel in the watery clasp.  Aurelio Zen, Dibdin’s roving Italian police bureaucrat and detective, is a native of Venice.  On first glance this looks to be a novel for travellers, art aficionados and those who truly appreciate Italian culture.

Dibdin is an excellent and compelling writer.  He draws the reader in with exquisite detail and magnificent description of scenes most of us will never see.  And his focus includes the very small things, the local phrases and fragments of dialect that bolster a sense of the removed and exotic in the minds of his readers.

One of the things that Dibdin makes clear here is, to quote Thomas Wolf, “you can’t go home again.”  He looks at memory, recognizes it for the important element of our character that it is. Then he dissects it, looking at some of the elements any of us who deny memory use to reshape its illusions and reform the facts into more comfortable present realities.

I can see why Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallender reads Michael Dibdin, why Mankell would pay attention to this writer.  There is a lot of movement in the mind, inside the heads of the main characters of ‘Dead Lagoon’.  They are fleshed out to the point that they seem to be real people.  The same is true for the landscape, as Dibdin makes Venice a living entity as real as Ystad, Sweden, is with Mankell.  One very accomplished writer recognizes another.

The story swells to take in much of the history of Venice.  The writing cascades in a river of description and intimate detail.  Much of it I love but, in the end, somehow I am left wanting!  I don’t feel as though the novel ended but rather the story disappeared.  Dibdin is a very good writer and I will try another of his novels.  I have to say though that I was disappointed in the conclusion of ‘Dead Lagoon’.

Excerpts from the novel:

MEMORY – Emptied of its furnishings, the room looked spacious and serene, yet how much smaller than he remembered it!  Whenever he had returned in his imagination – even a moment before, dithering on the landing – it had seemed a cavernous, epic space.  He almost laughed now, to see how insignificant it [his childhood bedroom] really was. But he did not laugh, for something within him died at that moment, and he knew that he had lost another and perhaps the most important of the few remaining threads which bound him to his childhood.

SEX – Whatever happened between him and Cristiana that afternoon, it would never have the serendipitous quality of that first encounter.  From now on, whatever happened would be meant, something to be weighed and measured and taken responsibility for.  He heaved a long sigh.  The medical authorities were quite right: there was no such thing as safe sex.

TRADITION – People thought Giacomo a bit odd, sculling out to tend his nets in this day and age.  No one rowed any more except the yuppy oarsmen from the city’s boating clubs.  But Giacomo had no interest in reviving the picturesque traditions of the past.  If he preferred oars to outboards, he had his reasons.  On an evening such as this, the noise of a motor carried for miles across the water…..

DISCRIMINATION – The teacher was a good soul, and would pay well over the odds for crabs and mussels, but she’d had the misfortune to be born on the mainland, and it was well known that mainlanders would believe anything.

VENICE, ITALY – …he had forgotten about the ‘black wells’, the septic tanks over which every Venetian home was built and into which flowed such effluvia as could not be discharged directly into the canals.

BROKEN REALITY – That frail and vulnerable figure lurking in the shadows at the edge of her mind had always been as insubstantial as thought, and Ada’s frantic attempts to summon her nothing more than someone crying out in their sleep.

POLITICS – “Total chaos,” Aldo Valentini repeated, leading the way back to the Questura.  “Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges ranging from corruption to association with the Mafia.  Result, no one dares to do a friend a favour any more.  Nothing would please me more that to see this country turn into a paradise of moral probity, but how the hell are we supposed to get by in the meantime.”

PLACE – He speaks the dialect with ease and precision, in the true Cannaregio accent – the purest in the city, Ada has always held.

VENICE, ITALY – Up ahead, a canopy of evergreen shrubbery spilt out over a high wall, betraying the presence of one of the city’s secret gardens, the original vegetable plots which had once lain at the centre of each of its hundred islands, providing produce for the inhabitants of the water front houses.

MEMORY – How many times had he followed this route home?  The thought inspired a sort of vertigo.  He recalled from contact with all those other selves, each of which had seemed so absolute at the time, but were now revealed as just another in a restless, flickering series of imposters.

SARAJEVO – He had been born in 1919 in Sarajevo, a city as notorious then, in the aftermath of the war which had been sparked off there, as it was again now that it had been abandoned to its fate by a world seemingly eager to demonstrate that it had learned nothing from the horrors of the intervening seventy-five years.

LOVE – That had been young love, aware only of its own delight.  Now it was time to get serious, to decide whether to make something of it, to settle down and found a family, or to break off the affair, walk away and try and forget the whole thing ever happened.

VENICE, ITALY – The city has turned into a geriatric hospital, there’s no work, no houses, and all our taxes go to line the pockets of some Mafia fat cat down south.

ECONOMY – That [$100,000] was more than twice Zen’s annual salary, which like that of all police officials had been frozen for the past five years as part of the government’s drive to reduce public spending in a country [Italy] where each newborn baby came into the world owing over half a million lire.

CHANGE – In a world where a judge could go on record as saying that the Italian Mafia and the Italian government were one and the same, nothing and no one was sacred any longer.

SEXUALITY – With Cristiana, it had been abundantly clear from that very first kiss that everything she did was done for her own pleasure as well as his.  She displayed an eager greed for caresses of all kinds, an inclusive sensuality which had brought a succession of climaxes in its wake and raised Zen to a state of exaltation he had never experienced before.

AFTERGLOW – The conversation of their bodies the night before had been as effortless and natural as the soft declension of surf on a beach, but to convert that exchange into the hard currency of language and everyday life seemed a daunting prospect.

FOOD – “Ah, the pleasures of food!” the Ferrarese exclaimed enthusiastically.  “What is sex compared to a great lunch?”

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