The first, Trollope's The Fixed Period, is set in his future and our past: the nineteen eighties. Located in an imaginary antipodean island, the story describes how some decades previously the country's youthful legislators had passed a law introducing compulsory euthanasia for those reaching 67. The novel explores what happens when the law is about to be applied for the first time - to one of the same parliamentarians who had so enthusiastically sponsored it many years before. As the press frequently reminds us, the elderly are becoming an increasing burden on the taxpayer and I'm sure within a few decades we will see voluntary euthanasia legalised. At first, like abortion in the late sixties, it will be limited to 'exceptional' cases, then rapidly become available to everyone on demand. And social pressure will lead to the elderly having about as much control as a foetus over whether they live or die. Trollope's book of course, is not a prescient look at our problems with an aging population. They would have been as inconceivable to a Victorian Englishman as they are to a twenty-first century Indian. He was using euthanasia, in the same way as Orwell used the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm, not as an end in itself but as a means of satirising Utopianism.
The second was Camilleri's (pictured on the right) latest Montalbano detective story, Una voce di notte [A Voice in the Night]. A book written by an octogenarian, featuring a protagonist on the threshold of old age, read by a sexagenarian*. Like the last six of the nineteen novels in the series it was a disappointment. The cast of supporting characters seemed reduced to caricatures of their former selves. Agente Catarella, continued to mishear people's names; Montalbano still had to stop Ispettore Fazio burdening him with a list of a suspect's ancestors dating back to Eve; the forensic surgeon, Pasquano was as irritable as ever; the face of the television presenter, Pippo Ragonese still looked like a 'culo di gaddrina' [hen's backside]; the public prosecutor, Tommaseo, retains his unhealthy interest in attractive female murder victims who've been subjected to sexual violence; etc; etc. Unfortunately, unlike the early novels in the series, there was no rounding out of their personalities, merely a perfunctory and tired recourse to their well-established stereotype. But this time the disappointment was the point. Camilleri was attempting a perfect marriage of form and content. To explain.
Camilleri is a cultivated and well-read man. This shows in his narrator's references to a wide range of literary texts, and in his plots occasionally referencing those of other novelists: L'odore della notte and Faulkner's A Rose for Emily is an example. But his relationship with 'serious' literature goes further. In Il campo del vasaio Camilleri had the nice conceit of Montalbano getting the inspiration to solve the crime he is working on from reading one of the author’s historical novels - one which doesn’t feature Montalbano. Unfortunately, in the opening chapter of La danza del gabbiano he went a step too far: Montalbano avoids a trip to Val di Noto with his partner, Livia, because they might run into the television crew filming one of Camilleri’s Montalbano’s novels! He even complains that the actor who plays him is bald - and, in real life the actor, Zingaretti (on the left in the picture), is - whilst he himself has plenty of hair. Unfortunately as La danza del gabbiano isn't a detective story by Umberto Eco, the conceit merely undermines the realism essential to the crime genre without adding any compensatory value. And I think it's Camilleri's newly developed penchant for inappropriate literary devices which is responsible for the failure of Una voce di notte, what he refers to in a note at the end of the novel as 'le segrete alchimie dei piani editoriali' [the hidden alchemies of the editorial plans].
Montalbano has just celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday and is depressed by the fact. Several of the last six novels have involved his relationships with younger women, a cliché of the male mid-life crisis. However, Una lama di luce, the novel immediately prior to Una voce di notte, ends with his facing up to the fact that he can never move beyond his relationship with Livia. Life has no more adventures to offer. Thus by presenting the reader with a coloured-in Montalbano inhabiting a monochrome world, the text reflects the way older people relate to life: their personal relationships run along well-worn grooves, friends and colleagues no longer surprise them. Eyesight and hearing fade and, like their hair, life loses its colour. So Una voce di notte perfectly reflects Montalbano's condition welding the author, protagonist and this ageing reader into a consubstantial trinity. We old folk instantly identify with 'Si vitti 'na pillicula di spionaggio della quali, come al solito, non ci accapì nenti' [He watched a spy film and as usual couldn't make head nor tail of it.]. The problem is that most of his readers aren't elderly, and those of us who are want their fiction to supply them with the colour and excitement which is missing from their reality - not to reflect it!
Still the book did introduce me to an idiomatic saying I hadn't come across before: 'farà vedere i sorci verdi ai Cuffaro' [he'll make the Cuffaro clan see the green mice] meaning 'he'll scare the living daylight out of the Cuffaros'. I'm very taken by it, but not sure it's discovery is worth the €14 I paid for the book!
In between these two explorations of the problem of old age I read Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, part of my Christmas present from James and Gabrielle. An altogether more significant work than either Camilleri or Trollope's offerings. Its description of the atmosphere of wartime Berlin, by a writer with first-hand experience, was so dark, brutal and claustrophobic that, in comparison, Camilleri's mafiosi-ridden Sicily seemed to have escaped from Enid Blyton's Sunny Smiles. If Trollope depicts human nature as the stumbling-block which trips up utopianism, Fallada shows us the monstrous reality of utopianism when it succeeds in establishing itself. The reality of a world free from 'inferior species' of humans, of 'sexual deviants' and all those other unfortunate aspects of life which so trouble the readers of the Daily Mail. and the members of Ukip.
*cf the theology of the Christian Trinity: ‘The First Person [Camilleri] knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word [Montalbano]; and this Idea, the perfect Image of Himself is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love - love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness [the text which can be internalised by the elderly reader] within the Divine Nature … [the] Third Person of the Blessed Trinity … the Holy Ghost …‘
*cf the theology of the Christian Trinity: ‘The First Person [Camilleri] knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word [Montalbano]; and this Idea, the perfect Image of Himself is the Second Person. The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love - love of one another, love of the glory of the Godhead which is their own; and just as the act of knowing produces an Idea within the Divine Nature, the act of loving produces a state of Lovingness [the text which can be internalised by the elderly reader] within the Divine Nature … [the] Third Person of the Blessed Trinity … the Holy Ghost …‘
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