THE CITY OF FALLING ANGELS
by John Berendt
Sceptre, £20; 341pp
£18 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

AUSTRIA STARVED HER, launched balloon bombs, tilted her cannons for more efficient killing, even sent in a luscious blonde Mata-hari, La Puttimato.

In answer, Venetians staged anti-Austrian operas at La Fenice, sold their jewels for guns, gave their hair for hospital pillows, shouting “Buon appetito” across the waters when the balloon-bombs were returned to sender by contrary winds. They forswore their favourite polenta colle seppie (in Austrian colours of black and yellow) for rice, peas and strawberries in patriotic green, white and red. And La Puttimato, seduced by a dashing Venetian, gave for free what she was supposed to charge for in secrets.

In The Siege of Venice, a poignant account of Venice’s ill-fated 1848 revolution, Jonathan Keates shows how the city threw off the hated yoke of the Austrian Empire, holding her own for 16 brave, Micawberish months.

This courageous act also liberated Venice from her habitual role as gloomy heroine of la leggenda nera, the black legend that the city had called down her own ruin by her heedless, greedy decadence.

Venice’s heroes were the new Venetian bourgeoisie. Led by the diminutive lawyer Daniele Manin, the city resisted “until the last slice of polenta”. The Venetian patriots had the best songs, but the Austrians held all the military cards. Passion was never going to be enough to save the Venetians. So when Austria blocked her fresh water, with cholera raging and not a single useful ally, Venice succumbed once more to the Prussian war machine.

Keates unravels all the strands in the scuffle for power as the mighty Hapsburg Empire wobbled at its southern and eastern edges. All his vivid portraits are in essence thumbnails of where Venice stood in the hearts of, for example, the sinewy old General Radetzky (he of Strauss’s March) and the dilatory, cold-hearted Charles Albert of Piedmont, the first Venice’s open enemy, the latter her effective betrayer.

This engrossing book is an overdue tribute to a period in modern history that the Venetians are justly proud of. Keates has delivered a sense of heroism back to these people, so often accused of losing their way five centuries ago.

I always wondered how the people of Savannah felt about John Berendt after they became involuntary extras in his multimedia bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The book must have earned Berendt a tidy sum on film rights alone: but exactly how did Savannah feel about its new notoriety?

Now I have a chance to empathise: ten years later, my own adopted city of Venice is getting the Berendt treatment in his latest book, The City of Falling Angels.

Now John Berendt has a rather different agenda to Jonathan Keates. The book’s inside jacket announces “behind the exquisite façade of the world’s most beautiful historic city, scandal, corruption and venality are rampant, and Berendt is a master at seeking them out”. So he came to Venice to dig dirt. To go to Venice to look for cruel and unusual things in order to write a book about them seems rather like going to a gift shop to buy a gift: the result is rather strained and artificial, and not really very cruel or unusual at all.

What does Berendt find? Certain items are bafflingly presented as revelations even though well chronicled already: that the fire at the Fenice opera house was arson; that the industrialist Volpi had a controversial political past; that the American Save Venice charity fractured after too many cocktail-stick duels among its glamorous patrons.

What else? The inventor of a rat poison that works by mimicking the national cuisine of each country where it is sold, though Venice does not use his products. An old family of glass-blowers divided by a feud. A suicide poet who leaves a fortune to a fruit-seller. Berendt lays a trail of interviews that accuse a high-profile expat couple of cultivating vulnerable old ladies to their own advantage.

The prizes were indeed glittering as the ladies concerned were Peggy Guggenheim and Ezra Pound’s mistress, Olga Rudge, the latter story an Aspern Papers for our times. Corrupt institutions? Well, there’s the “shock” that Venice issues paid-for retrospective “pardons” for abusive building work; and a one-time minister of Venice’s English church refers to it as a “convenience store”, himself preferring cocktails to evensong.

All this mild sordidness is somehow far more palatable when Donna Leon does it in her dark but lyrical detective novels — more empathetic, less sensationalised and therefore more moving. Ironically Leon’s characters, who are invented, speak like real people, whereas Berendt’s characters, who are real, mostly proselytise in extended paragraphs. (Leon’s also pay in lire or euro, without a US dollar conversion each time, and I don’t believe that her Venetians would ever quantify Venice as “barely twice the size of Central Park”.)

There is this to be said for Falling Angels: it moves along and is packed with meat. Berendt stirs his various cauldrons deftly, reheating the Fenice story, for example, over an eight-year period, from just after the fire until the opening of the rebuilt opera house. Like Dan Brown, he’s good at cliffhangers. He can raise a laugh. Sometimes you see the film script in the making, especially when he cuts back and forth between Venice and New York.

It is a melancholy thought that Berendt’s celebrity will ensure that Falling Angels is the book that most of America will read about Venice this year, not the magnificent Jonathan Keates. And in this way poor Venice’s leggenda nera will be made to live again.

Michelle Lovric is the author of three novels set in Venice: Carnevale, The Floating Book and The Remedy (Virago), also the anthology Venice, Tales of the City (Little, Brown)

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