After its disappointingly routine predecessor, Donna Leon’s new novel Falling in Love, out this month, brings her back up to standard with a thriller set in and around Venice’s Fenice Theatre, where her chain of Guido Brunetti novels began more than twenty books ago.
As she has already proved, she knows enough about opera to steer a story through the intricacies of such a subject and, though this one did not disclose anything I did not already know, it sustains its plot - about a star soprano pursued by a creepy stalker, the way Elisabeth Soderstrom famously was in real life - to enjoyably melodramatic effect.
Since the book concerns a series of performances of Puccini’s Tosca, a work thoroughly despised by Brunetti’s wife Paola, an authority on the novels of Henry James, melodrama is the appropriate word. But since the tale starts with a touching Italian quotation from Handel, and one of its crucial episodes involves the backstage singing of a Handel aria, it is easy to see where the author’s sympathies really lie.
It’s a theme, not irrelevant to this latest of her books, which she could develop further in future. But the passing references to Handelian sexual deviation do this present book a subtly subversive service. It is Puccini who gets a little in the way as the story moves into its final scene, though this, admittedly, does it no great harm.
13 May 2015
As she has already proved, she knows enough about opera to steer a story through the intricacies of such a subject and, though this one did not disclose anything I did not already know, it sustains its plot - about a star soprano pursued by a creepy stalker, the way Elisabeth Soderstrom famously was in real life - to enjoyably melodramatic effect.
Since the book concerns a series of performances of Puccini’s Tosca, a work thoroughly despised by Brunetti’s wife Paola, an authority on the novels of Henry James, melodrama is the appropriate word. But since the tale starts with a touching Italian quotation from Handel, and one of its crucial episodes involves the backstage singing of a Handel aria, it is easy to see where the author’s sympathies really lie.
It’s a theme, not irrelevant to this latest of her books, which she could develop further in future. But the passing references to Handelian sexual deviation do this present book a subtly subversive service. It is Puccini who gets a little in the way as the story moves into its final scene, though this, admittedly, does it no great harm.
13 May 2015
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