Zen and the art of investigation
Michael Vestey
BACK TO BOLOGNA by Michael Dibdin Faber, £10, pp. 223, ISBN 0571227759 Aurelio Zen returns, this time, as the title indicates, in Bologna. Our Venetian-born hero from Criminalpol at the Interior Ministry in Rome, a vice-questore now, a senior detective indeed, is out of sorts, experiencing middle-aged dreads and hypochondria, and as cynical as ever. In fact, he’s lost his appetite for work, which is unlike him, but he is, to be fair, recovering from unexplained stomach surgery. As usual, all is not running smoothly in his love life, this time in his relationship with Gemma Santini, the younger woman he picked up on a Tuscan beach during a previous assignment (And Then You Die) and with whom he lives in Lucca. It appears he might be getting bored with her, which is typical of Zen.
Dibdin’s specialities in the Zen novels are to delineate and reflect the tenebrous, menacing side of Italy, the pitiless nature of the Mafia, the corruption of the state and church, the ever-present inter-regional rivalries and loathings — Bolognesi might detest Parmigiani and everybody seems to dislike Romans and Sicilians — and the venality that can thrive in the Italian family. In this book, however, there is less of this and, while he’s always been witty, there’s far more humour than I remember from his other stories.
Zen is sent to Bologna to monitor the local investigation of the murder of the industrialist owner of the city’s football club, shot and then stabbed — symbolically with a Parmesan knife, as he’s from Parma up the motorway. He’s not meant to investigate the crime but, being Zen, he finds himself doing just that with the help of a young police patrolman called Bruno; Zen had used his influence to have Bruno transferred from the German-speaking Alto Adige region of northern Italy back to his native Bologna (a story from the previous Zen mystery, Medusa). Bruno was loudly going mad and shouting abuse at the ‘stocky, stolid Teutonic blockheads’ and was so pathetically grateful to be moved ‘from the cloud of graceless silence and the glares of loathing lasered his way by the locals’ that once back in Bologna he keeps blowing ten euros on votary tapers at his local church and he’s not even particularly religious.
In Back to Bologna, Dibdin creates three wonderfully comic characters, worthy of Evelyn Waugh: a blundering alcoholic private detective, un investigatore privato, who actually thinks he’s Philip Marlowe roaming the mean streets; a preposterous TV celebrity chef who breaks into arias during his culinary performances and who in reality not only can’t cook but hates it; and an internationally renowned professor of semiotics, a stupendous, stupefacente pseud called Edgardo Ugo — Ecos here of another world-famous professor of semiotics at Bologna University who wrote a best-seller?
Even with crime fiction of this sophistication and high-quality writing, the plot is driven by the coincidences necessary to maintain pace and compression, which somehow work but which wouldn’t in nondetective fiction. Dibdin is never dull, any more than Zen is. So that’s my Zen fix taken care of for two years.
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