A splendid mess
Tom Hiney
THE POPE'S RHINOCEROS by Lawrence Norfolk Sinclair-Stevenson, £14.99, pp. 608 Long novels should earn their weight, and this one does on several counts. The Pope's Rhinoceros is an excellent, bawdy adventure set at the court of Pope Leo X and on the west coast of India. The author spins his yarn with colour, power and wit. Like Tolkien, Norfolk sets an epic scene, fills it with mediaeval-ish grifters and then takes you on into a magnificent story. The research that must have gone into this book is colossal, but it is testament to the author's genius that his writing never sniffs of library cards — the language and detail he uses is beguiling, rather than merely impressive. Norfolk is, above all, a champi- on storyteller.
The setting is relatively straightforward. Leo X (cardinal at 13, pope at 38) is a Medici by name and reputation. Extrava- gant, witty and cynical, he is already bored by power in 1515. He has been Pope for two years. The Portuguese and Spanish ambassadors in Rome are falling over themselves to win colonial permission from him — the New World is there for the tak- ing, but without Leo's approval it is politi- cally meaningless. Rome's sewers are spawning a rat crisis, the city's taverns are filthy venues of debauchery, and chiselling money-changers are looking into the prospects of overseas venture capitalism. Norfolk presents this world of whores, rats, pies and uncelibate priests with both preci- sion (at least ten pages on the rats alone) and verve. Everything he shows us sticks in the imagination. The minor characters seem alive; the incidental vignettes are as well told as the climaxes; nothing seems to have been put in for the sake of it.
In Salvestro we also have an excellent hero. He is a retired mercenary from the Baltic in search of a less short-term way to make money. Even for a soldier, Rome is a shockingly sinful place to arrive at: Salve- stro's first notion of this occurs within moments of entering the city with his side- kick Bernardo. A group of soldiers are gang-raping a girl and ask Salvestro whether he and Bernardo want a go. Salve- stro says no, but on realising that they are going to kill her instead he accepts the offer. The soldiers watch him mount the girl and then drift off. Salvestro immediate- ly takes off his coat to keep her warm, but the girl has died; with him inside her. He leaves her on the street.
Pope Leo, meanwhile, (who is a keen hunter) has decided that he wants a rhinoceros for his gardens. He encourages the Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors to believe that the first to bring him such an animal will get special treatment when he comes to divide up America and India. The Iberian counsels know Leo to be a whimsical man and decide that he is proba- bly joking. After enough bluffing, double- crossing and paranoia to confuse both characters and reader, Salvestro and Bernardo find themselves on a Spanish ship commissioned by Madrid to fetch a rhinoceros from India. Unknown to them the boat is a sham, intended to sink once out of port. But it doesn't.. .
This is Norfolk's second novel (his first sold half a million copies) and it is a relief to find no dust-jacket photo or potted biog- raphy in The Pope's Rhinoceros — it is a depressing experience to get absorbed in a book only to be confronted by a goofy face and the author's 'A' Level results at the back. It can be calculated, nonetheless, that this monster took Norfolk about four years to write. And it is interesting, given that, to see how his style changed over the course of writing the novel. Outrageously epic at the beginning (where we learn about Baltic geology), it shifts through long periods of melodrama, carnality, mysticism, farce and satire. Not all these shifts feel as if they were planned —Norfolk, one suspects, was not always in control of his book. But that only makes it the more exciting. There is enough over-neat cynicism around to make this splendid mess worth reading. Worth re-reading, in fact.
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