Desire under the volcano
Robert Edric
BETRAYAL IN NAPLES by Neil Griffiths Viking, .£9.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0670914606 First the improbables and implausibles (and I give nothing away here: the publishers bullet-point the whole of Neil Griffiths's plot on the jacket): a man, Jim Wolf, visits Naples for a two-day break on a whim. Upon arrival he is mysteriously ill and so allows himself to be delivered to a strange pensione, there to be cared for by a strangely detached landlady in a bare, uncomfortable room.
Recovering and emerging into the Neapolitan sunlight, Jim immediately encounters an old flame (ten years have drifted by), with whom he is still in love, and for whom he develops a hasty and unwise obsession. Hasty for all the usual reasons, and because she, too, has apparently kept a light burning under her own passion for Jim. Unwise because said flame is now married to an older man; an older, very serious, very powerful and domineering man, who is also a senior judge at the height of a major Mafia trial.
Jim, lost in the haze of his obsessive desire, misses his flight home and agrees to stay for a few weeks longer, mainly so he can take in a few Caravaggios and then afterwards attend the Mafia trial, where he can inadver
tently reveal himself to be an acquaintance of the judge and thereby not endear himself to the rest of the watching Mafia family.
Except he does endear himself to one member of the said family: the beautiful young woman who turns out to be the jealously guarded sister of the Mafia chief in the dock, and who begs Jim to rescue her from her life of subservience and Mafia servitude, thereby endearing him even less to the keenly watching Mafia thugs.
And after that — beatings, gunshots, honour lost, blood on the marble staircase, silence, shame, honour regained, revenge, stuff-strutting, Vespa-riding, spaghetti-sauceand-sex scenes aside (and there are many of these asides) — it starts to get complicated.
Now a minor but irritating contrivance: at the start of this book, the very start, line three, Jim is lying on the floor (Piazza Garibaldi) bleeding copiously from a gunshot wound and pressing his fingers into the hole. As a How-To-Open-Your-Novel pitch, this is both unnecessary and contrived. No one would contuine reading Neil Griffiths's sharply written, finely paced, occasionally frustrating, occasionally overdone, though frequently urgent, gripping, visceral and pandemonious novel just to see who finally sticks the snub-nose into Jim's paunch 350 pages later on.
Curiously dated and sensible in it's A to B to C headlong plunge into the Neapolitan maelstrom of frantic couplings and unravellings, there is something satisfyingly Hannayish about Jim Wolf. Griffiths, clearly well versed in contemporary noir, is heir in this book to Jim Thompson at his near best, to Cornell Woolrich and to John Franklin Bardin, and it is testament to his capabilities as a writer — especially to his understanding of how a book might be propelled forward under the weight and momentum of its story alone — that these improbabilities, implausibilities and contrivances are readily and willingly left behind.
Visiting the Amalfi coast this summer? Then this is the book for you. But please don't eat the clams; don't get into strange taxis; don't sleep with the sisters of Mafia dons or the wives of senior judges. And don't think you are ever — ever — going to impress the capo di tutu i capo with your obsidian cygnet ring, your neat white shirt and sharp black suit, or with your seven words of badly accented Neapolitanese, one of which will undoubtedly be paranoico.
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