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There are few phrases on a book jacket more calculated to strike fear in my heart than "transcends genre." So it was with some reluctance that I opened Rupert Thomson's SECRECY, on the back of which these words are prominently displayed, anticipating a surfeit of italics and an absence of plot. Happily, I had nothing to fear.
It is difficult to know just what genre SECRECY might transcend, to begin with. It is an historical novel, set in late 17th C. Florence, with a real if somewhat underdocumented artist as protagonist. It is a remarkable and touching love story. There's a murder and a murderer in it too and a tension-filled climax. Add in some tactfully introduced social history and a few reflections on the purpose and nature of art, all expressed in supple and effective prose, and it is hard to say why the whole question of genre should have arisen in the first place.
The main narrative, recounted by an artist named Zummo, is bracketed by two brief accounts in the voice of Marguerite-Louise d'Orléans, former wife of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and now abbess of a convent in Paris. She relates what occurred when Zummo, now representing himself as Zumbo ("the French find it easier") paid her a visit in 1701. He has information regarding her daughter - no, not Anna Maria, Electress Palatine - the other one, the one whom nobody knows about. And there Marguerite-Louise's tale breaks off, not to be resumed for more than three hundred pages.
Zummo begins his story in 1691 as he is about to enter Florence on the invitation of the Grand Duke. But before he can pass into the city, he pauses to look back over his shoulder to see what might be pursuing him, a fear that dates back fifteen years, to his youth in Sicily, his native country, from which he had to make a sudden escape in fear of his life, thanks to a calumny invented by his elder and pathologically jealous brother. So serious a charge it was that even Zummo's parents turned their backs on him. He was innocent, but "there's a kind of truth in a well-told lie, and that truth can cling to you like the taste of raw garlic or the smell of smoke." So he has been wandering ever since, and perfecting his art of modelling in wax, creating small tableaux of figures in the throes of the plague, meticulously detailed, horrifying and beautiful.
The Grand Duke has seen his work and admired it, inviting Zummo to come to Florence, where the Duke will offer him commissions. Florence in the last quarter of the 17th century was a place where "everything was forbidden, and anything was possible." It was a city of intense sexual repression - young men could be flogged or fined merely for mooning after a young woman; much worse would ensue if the pair became intimate. There was an Office of Public Decency to enforce decorum. One of the first sights to greet Zummo as he enters the city is the impaled heads of "sodomites" displayed on the prison wall. Tuscany was almost bankrupt and some were starving, In one nightmarish scene, a family weak from hunger attempts to waylay Zummo in order to steal his horse so they might have something to eat. They would have eaten him as well, he is told, if they had caught him. Zummo was already nervous before he came to Florence; the atmosphere of repression, suspicion, and intrigue does nothing to improve his confidence. As it turns out, this is just as well, as there are those at court who regard him as a threat and will do what they can to harm him. And they can do quite a lot.
Zummo renders himself even more vulnerable to threat and menace when he falls in love with a mysterious young woman, an apothecary's assistant, named Faustina. In the sexually repressive regime in force in Florence, their relationship renders both liable to dreadful punishments. Zummo could be beaten, fined, or even sentenced to the galleys in Livorno; worse still awaited Faustina, who could be stripped and publicly flogged on the football grounds for failing to wear a yellow ribbon that proclaimed her as a whore. The Taliban seem to have invented very little. Faustina must immediately leave the city and go into hiding while Zummo develops a plan to try to combat the threat. It is at this point that the book moves from a love story embedded in a rich evocation of an historical period into a taut and ingenious thriller.
All of these threads sometimes appear to leave certain elements hanging, but the reader is advised to have patience - it all comes together, if not in obvious ways. One has to wait until the very last contribution by Marguerite-Louise, however, in order fully to comprehend the significance of Zummo's rendition of the Grand Duke's grand commission, a sculpture in wax, cast from the body of a freshly-murdered woman, rendered in exquisite detail, and designed to compensate the duke for the absence of his wife.
On the basis of SECRECY alone, it is difficult to understand why its author is not better known in America. It is a brilliant book that yields its secrets slowly, knowing that no secret worth keeping can ever be fully revealed. It casts the kind of spell that lingers long after the last page is read.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2014
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