Venetian Vespers

An English writer and his secretive bride make a fateful visit to Italy in Banville’s eerie latest (after The Drowned). By the time Evelyn Dolman meets American heiress Laura Rensselaer in 1899, he has abandoned his dreams of becoming a “lord of language,” and instead made a career writing cheap travel guides. After he proposes to Evelyn, they have sex and she proves to be “no stranger to the night-world where Eros reigns.” Her oil baron father, Willard, dies shortly after the wedding, and Laura, refusing to explain why he left her little of his fortune, insists on a belated winter honeymoon in Venice. Dolman, who speaks no Italian, is miserable from the cold and from Laura’s refusal to have sex with him since their first and only time. She urges him to visit a café popular with tourists, where he meets a stranger named Freddie FitzHerbert, who claims to be his former schoolmate, and Freddie’s alluring sister, Francesca. Dolman returns home drunk and rapes Laura, then wakes to find that she’s vanished. As the Italian police organize a search, Dolman, unworried for Laura’s safety, begins an affair with Francesca. Banville sustains a sinister atmosphere in the strange and subtle narrative, and he keeps the reader guessing as to what degree Evelyn is the victim of others’ machinations. This ambiguous tale will linger in readers’ minds. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)