BOOKS

Heavily stressed Arcadia

David Sexton AFTER HANNIBAL by Barry Unsworth Hamish Hamilton, £16, pp. 243 Prhaps Cyril Connolly expressed it most pathetically, in The Unquiet Grave some 50 years ago — that dream of owning a house elsewhere, in another country, in another climate, where life will be altogether better. But we're all post-Peter Mayle now. The romance of the residence secondaire has become our dominant form of pastoral, current in many guises, sometimes a mem- oir, sometimes a novel, sometimes just a column. There's also real life, of course, many believe.

Despite John Mortimer, Frederick Raphael, and more lately John Lanchester, it's a genre still waiting for its masterpiece. Barry Unsworth's treatment of these vul- nerable dreams may not quite deserve that name, but it's remarkably good nonethe- less, a brilliant treatment of the subject. After Hannibal is set on a hillside in Umbria, above the shores of Lake Trasimeno, near the site where in 217 BC Hannibal slaughtered many thousands of Romans in an ambush described in Livy. Unsworth has lived in this area for some Years now (when he shared the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, he announced he'd spend the money on an artesian well for his house, so capping Byatt's swimming Pool and Arnis's curtains).

Unsworth's descriptions of this landscape are wonderfully evocative, all the more touching for the apparent plainness of his prose. Each character sees the place differ- ently, their perceptions revealing their own nature too. Thus, of one of the nicest of them, it is observed:

It was the time of day that he liked best, the time between sunset and dusk, when for a while the colours were deepened and the slopes of the hills were visited by a light uniquely radiant and soft. It was this light that he waited for. He had seen it nowhere else but in Umbria. It came suddenly, shortly before the onset of darkness, like a gentle assertion of some value in danger of being forgotten.

But this is no facile rural rhapsody to gladden the heart of the agriturist office. On the contrary, it's a singularly sharp account of the needs and delusions that have brought people to this place. Essen- tially, there are five short stories here, about the occupants of five properties, Joined together by a strada vicinale, an unmade road, as a kind of literal structural device. Short chapters cut back and forth between these intertwining narratives and it a mark of Unsworth's command that not only do they remain sharply distinct but none of them come to seem irritating inter- ruptions to the others. (Most multiple nar- ratives soon divide into interesting bits and

boring bits.) The Chapmans, a mismatched English couple, occupy the first house, a holiday home. He is a property developer, aggres- sively businesslike; she gentle, cultivated, unselfish. As the novel opens, Harold Chapman has become involved in a dispute about the maintenance of this road with the only Italian peasant family remaining on the hillside, the Chechettis, grasping brutes portrayed by Unsworth without any sentimentality. Here's one of the classic ways in which dream homes turn into nightmares.

Finding the Chechettis are practising a primitive form of blackmail, Harold seeks to recruit all the other residents of the hill- side to his quarrel, so providing the book with one connecting thread. He also turns to a sinister lawyer in Perugia, Mancini, who gradually becomes involved with most Civil service humour of the others too.

A lawsuit in Italy can notoriously take ten or even 20 years to pass through all its stages. William Ward, in Getting it Right in Italy, frankly advises bribery: 'Don't feel • too guilty about compromising yourself.' Mancini takes the same view. In Italy, peo- ple avoid official dealings when they can, he explains to his appalled clients.

'My God', you will hear someone say when he has become invoh;ed with officialdom, 'Hannnibal at the gates!' So people try to find unofficial ways of dealing with their problems, they develop furbizia, cunning, and this is more admired among us than honesty.

Dispassionate and all-seeing, perhaps not quite mortal, Mancini devises all kinds of ruses and ambushes: his relationship with his clients is only a slight exaggeration of the hopeless dependency upon their lawyers that develops in all those who become caught up in lawsuits — another fine way of turning hopes to ashes.

Even Mancini can do little for the Greens, however — American art histori- ans who have retired to the Italy they love, only to be preyed upon by a criminal British 'project manager' named Blemish. This monster, who cavorts around in fancy dress in his spare time, is an unusually broad and vehement sketch from Unsworth — let's hope not drawn from experience. Step by step, he deliberately ruins the Greens' house as a way of binding them to him and extracting as much money from them as he can for as long as possible. This horror story will unnerve anybody intend- ing restoration of a delightful ruin. By the time Blemish has finished, the Greens have only each other left, but their marriage, at least, is a rock. Unsworth is notably acute about couples: two marriages die in this novel; one may be saved. After Hannibal demonstrates with deadly clarity how often the setting up of such homes is not truly mutual but one-sided, frequently evolving into an expression of all that is wrong in a relationship. (It's a pattern often detectable in the flourishing genre of sub-Mayle memoirs, the most tragic instance known to me being a story of a family moving to Cahors published as A French Affair — the author's wife's French affair, as it turns out.) Unsworth deepens these tales of real estate catastrophe by creating two charac- ters who are obsessed with the past and so bring it into the current of the book. Ritter, a German translator, the son of a Nazi offi- cer who served in Rome during the war, is seeking some release from his guilt in isola- tion and physical labour. He finds solace in the discovery of the traces of war here too, on what is now his property. He feels less alone, more able to cultivate his holding:

A thing planted is a hope expressed, he told himself as he stood there. A hope of continu- ing, if nothing more.

Monti, an academic from Turin, renting his house on the hill, is researching the bloody history of Perugia, a city savagely contested by warring families, the papacy and the people. Through his meditations, Unsworth supplies an occasionally slightly over-moralised backdrop.

Monti felt again the impact of fatality in this chain of events. Buildings demolished, new ones built. Human relations not much differ-

ent, structures of affections. In the founda- tions there were always flaws, seeds of subsi- dence and decay, faults that needed attention if the house was to stand.

If that's over-explicit — and a few other parts of After Hannibal do feel a little pat — it is perhaps only because so much material has been compressed into a rela- tively short book. It is, at any rate, never dull. Few novelists now writing are any- thing like as reliably enjoyable as Barry Unsworth. As with the novels of Brian Moore or the poetry of Larkin, there's very little the reviewer needs to say about his fiction, except: read it.