Feisty Renaissance woman
Alan Wall
THE BIRTH OF VENUS
by Sarah Dunant Little, Brown, £12.99, pp. 412, ISBN 0316725498
What is it that the contemporary writer brings to historical fiction? Well, we've taken to filling in a lot more of the intimate details, that's for sure. Whatever else you might find out from George Eliot's version of the Florence of Savonarola, you won't get anything like as much nitty-gritty on the subject of menstruation as you do here. And any woman planning on marrying a committed homosexual might perhaps want to reconsider the matter after reading what could be the most horrendous nuptial scene since Idi Amin opened up his fridge to remind his latest bride of her previous admirers. Bluebeard's secret chamber is a mere Tussaud's tearoom in comparison. One starts to see why Italian nunneries were so frequently crammed to the chapel roof with prayerful maidens committed to a life of chastity. The passage is so punitively vivid that the reader feels briefly like a panicked badger fleeing the attentions of Ron Davies.
What we bring to historical fiction is of course our preoccupations, which is why all reconstructions of the past are a dialogue between the present and what has gone before, whether the writer acknowledges the fact or not. What this novel retrospectively inserts into the world of 15th-century Florence is the feistiness and creativity of a particular woman, her obsession with art, her loves and hatreds, her coming into womanhood and her subsequent pregnancy. The novelist can only bring alive what she still perceives as living. For the rest, as Louis MacNeice said about the world of classical antiquity, it was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago.
The Florence portrayed in the book is quickening with Greek philosophy, but also beginning to hear the stern rebukes of the fearsome Dominican, determined to make a bonfire of the vanities and dispense for ever with the influence of pagan thinkers. There is much local colour; we see a great deal of the furniture of history, its arrases and rich brocades, its caskets, embroideries and silver belts. And in the centre of it all is Alessandra, painter, lover, mother and ultimately nun.
The danger of any historical fiction is that we simply get to hear modern themes played on antique instruments. Or to put it another way, we don't read Romola these days to find out about Savonarola, but George Eliot. When Alessandra says early in the book, 1 really think until that moment I had believed that artists somehow came directly from God, and therefore had more of the spirit and less of man about them,' one shifts a little uneasily, wondering if the lens of Romanticism is being fitted over the optic of the Renaissance.
But Sarah Dunant carries off the daring plot with considerable panache. The great figures of history come and go, along with some of the artists who adorned Florence in its greatest hours of glory and misery. There's certainly plenty of misery here. The pregnancy induces a morning sickness that soon takes up afternoons, evenings and nights as well, and appears to verge on the hyperemesis that killed poor Charlotte Brontë. Fortunately, Alessandra has a servant, dark-skinned and cunning, who is skilled in the unofficial apothecary's art. One of the most powerful sections of the book is undoubtedly the extraordinary account of going into labour and giving birth. It is hard to imagine how any man could have written it, though to be fair it's hard to imagine how George Eliot could have written it either.
This is a powerful and evocative novel.
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