Imprimatur — Rita Monaldi & Francesco Sorti
Translated from the Italian by Peter Burnett
While Le Monde calls this novel “gripping”, I have to confess I found it a difficult book to get into, and really had to push hard to get past the first third of the book, after which things began to gel for me and the action started to speed up. Part of the problem might be that this was a translation from the Italian (though a good one). Another was that there is a large cast of characters introduced very quickly at the start, and to keep them all straight I had to literally make a list of their names, their professions, and where they were from. I consulted this list frequently!
The body of the novel is set in 1683, at an inn in Rome, which at the start of the action has just been quarantined due to a suspicion that one of the guests has the plague. The doors are locked and no one can go in or out.
Forced into close association like this, fearful that they will die of the contagion, the atmosphere is tense between the eleven guests and two members of staff. Made far worse when the oldest guest promptly dies, a fact the people inside the inn try to keep secret from the guards outside.
The narrator of this story is a young boy, described occasionally as a dwarf, who is the assistant to the inn-keeper. The other major character is Abbot Atto Melani: castrato, singer, spy, agent for the French King, and perhaps much more. Melani recruits the boy to assist him in unveiling the true identities and motives of the other guests. Together, they find a way to reach the underground passages which run like a labyrinth beneath Rome. In this way, they can extend their investigations and track one or more of the guests who also know of this passage and who are using it for nefarious purposes.
Where I found the novel particularly slow was when Melani gives his young assistant history lessons at some length. Well, when I say ‘history’ I suppose I mean lessons in the contemporary politics of the time. These became a little tedious. The novel is at its best when things are happening, particularly the hectic chase scene through Rome near the end of the book.
The whole thrust of the novel is a deadly serious one: it is framed as a counter to the prospect of the Pope Innocent XI (in power in 1683) being made a saint. The authors attempt to prove that Innocent XI was in many ways corrupt, and in particular, was responsible for secret loans to William of Orange (a Protestant) to fund his invasion of England and the usurpation of the throne of James II (a Catholic). So serious is this accusation that Imprimatur has been proscribed by the Catholic Church and boycotted by Italian publishers and the press.
But this serious attack on Innocent XI might have been better framed in some clearly non-fictional work. Here, it makes for a series of tedious appendices in which it becomes very difficult to separate fact from fiction: what is real historical fact and what is invented fact trying to convince the reader that the events of the fictional story really happened exactly as presented. I have to admit I skipped a lot of this material.
Still, I was glad that I read the book once I had reached the end. There are two more novels based on Abbott Melani and his dwarf assistant. I won’t be tackling these in a hurry, but I will get to them.
