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Tag Archives: psychological suspense

Venice Illusions: Palace of the Drowned

17 Monday May 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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"no--and furthmore", 1966, book review, brittle characters, Christine Mangan, generational conflict, historical fiction, literary fiction, literary jealousy, literary thriller, paranoia, psychological suspense, Venice

Review: Palace of the Drowned, by Christine Mangan
Flatiron, 2021. 272 pp. $28

It’s 1966, and Frances (Frankie) Croy has fled to Venice to hide. More than a decade has passed since her debut novel captured the London literary world, during which she’s published a string of failures. A particularly cutting review of her work has cast her writing style as a dinosaur whose long-deserved extinction can’t happen soon enough. A hypersensitive loner, Frankie has let that review get under her skin, believing — with some reason — that her editor shares the negative opinion.

At a publicity gathering for someone else, Frankie erupts violently, having misinterpreted postures and expressions around her as slights. The London tabloids eat this up, and Frankie just manages to avoid legal trouble. After a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital that does her no good and only spawns further gossip columns, she’s taken flight to Venice, where friends loan her a palazzo, known as the Palace of the Drowned.

The doge’s palace, Venice, November 1966, during a flood (unknown author; courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As you may have guessed, Frankie is quite the paranoid. But this novel operates under the old adage that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody’s after you. And much to her consternation, shortly after her arrival in Venice, a woman much younger than she accosts her, says they’ve met before, and declares herself an admirer of Frankie’s work, especially that debut novel.

Frankie’s certain she’s never met “the girl,” as she thinks of Gilly Larson (though she understands that descriptive is fast becoming déclassé) and wonders what her game is. Gilly fastens herself to Frankie like a leech, offering literary opinions she can’t seem to keep to herself, and which would appear to criticize Frankie’s work, except for that debut novel. To rephrase the adage: Just because a leech professes to like you doesn’t mean she won’t suck your blood.

So the game’s afoot, and a clever, well-crafted game it is. It’s not that Palace of the Drowned proposes a cat-and-mouse relationship between Frankie and Gilly. Rather, Frankie wonders whether that’s what they’ve got, or if she’s reading malign intent into innocent, if strange, behavior. Frankie goes back and forth, at times suspicious, at times grateful for Gilly’s companionship and generosity, from which she learns about the city she detested at first sight but has come to appreciate.

I like how Mangan taps into the pervasive fear belonging to people insecure in their accomplishments, especially when a seemingly more confident youngster comes along. I also like the way the narrative depicts an author fiercely anxious about her creative powers who fears she has only one thing to say and said it years ago. You don’t have to be a writer — or any form of artist — to put yourself in Frankie’s place.

That’s what saves the novel for me. The first hundred pages feel like a chore, because none of the characters appeal to me. Mangan has chosen to enact her tale with a brittle, difficult, even obnoxious cast. Frankie seems to care about no one but herself, and I don’t get why she instinctively pushes people away. Gilly’s self-righteous, intrusive, and controlling, too interested in what other people think of her to see them for themselves. Frankie’s friends, the ones who loan her the palazzo, strike poses I find tiresome, while her editor gives publishing a bad name (and makes a couple implausible moves).

Mangan’s assemblage does offer ample opportunity for conflict, therefore creating “no — and furthermore,” the essence of any thriller. She need not strain for plot points, because much of the story comes from within, and credibly so. You also don’t get too cozy with anyone, so you can readily believe them capable of just about anything. But if you’re like me, you cease to care, and only when Frankie’s vulnerabilities feel at all human, rather than merely repellent, do I latch on.

Palace of the Drowned is a literary thriller, and the prose does a fine job creating character and mood:

Before Venice, Frankie had never seen fog so thick.… Here, it rolled in discernible waves, curled around her ankles, so that she could feel it, engulfing her. The Venetian fog seemed capable of obscuring everything — and she had found a peculiar type of comfort in it, in being wrapped up, swaddled, and feeling as though a cloak of invisibility had been draped around her shoulders. It wasn’t just her sight that became affected — sound became muffled as well. Shapes no longer appeared rooted to anything.

Whether Palace of the Drowned will please you probably depends on your tolerance for its characters. Mangan’s a gifted author, and her psychological portrayals ring true. Yet this book is too cold for me to embrace.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review, where this post appeared in different form.

A Ship of Fools: Dangerous Crossing

08 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1939, anti-Semitism, Australia, book review, historical fiction, Katherine Anne Porter, literary fiction, psychological suspense, Rachel Rhys, shipboard romance, social prejudices, World War II

Review: Dangerous Crossing, by Rachel Rhys
Atria, 2018. 351 pp. $26

In late July 1939, Lily Shepard sails from her native England to Australia, among other young women recruited for domestic service (and duly chaperoned). Like her half-dozen peers and, indeed, most everyone else on the Orontes, Lily’s escaping a crushing disappointment, or trying to. Only it seems that her past haunts her in new guises, whether it’s the same sort of unsuitable man to whom she’s drawn or increasingly complicated moral decisions that seem all too familiar. And though Lily doesn’t realize it, or prefers not to, the world is sliding rapidly toward war.

It’s hard to read this novel without recalling Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, which featured a similar collection of thwarted escapists butting heads against their shortcomings or one another en route to prewar Nazi Germany. But Dangerous Crossing has its own pleasures, chief among them the psychological suspense. A prologue, which jumps ahead to when the ship docks in Australia, reveals that a crime has been committed on board. After finishing the book, I understand why Rhys has done this, and it’s extremely clever, but Dangerous Crossing isn’t a mystery per se.

The narrative derives its considerable tension from Lily’s confused attempts to understand her fellow passengers’ behavior, especially that of a young man who seems attracted to her, yet inexplicably blows hot and cold. She’s particularly vulnerable, because, in her last domestic situation, the young man of the house nearly seduced her with false claims of love, only to abandon her and damage someone else. Also puzzling are the Campbells, two wealthy, spoiled libertines rumored to have a scandalous past. They’ve clearly offended their fellows in first class and force themselves on Lily’s circle a deck below. The Campbells treat her and her friends like playthings, but she’s fascinated, despite herself. Then there’s a Jewish woman who just managed to get out of Austria, but who hasn’t heard from her family and who’s being persecuted by an unidentified enemy on board — or is it, as the ship’s many anti-Semites suggest, her fantasies?

As these puzzles proliferate and deepen in complexity, conflicting social prejudices and mores emerge. Rhys excels here, portraying class divisions and various shades of racial bigotry and anti-Semitism, turning the Orontes into a microcosm of a hate-filled world pole-vaulting toward catastrophe. In these circumstances, a lesser writer would content herself with stereotypes, but Rhys takes the high road, peeling away layers of bitterness and jealousy to reveal the yearnings underneath. Lily, too, has her moral failures, though I wish Rhys had plumbed her nascent envy a little further.

Rhys sets her scene well, both in ports of call and aboard ship:

After dinner there is a palpable frisson in the air as the band sets up… Though she hasn’t had anything to drink, Lily nevertheless feels intoxicated. It’s a mixture of the music and the beautiful clothes, the silks and velvets and chiffons, the peacock greens and sapphire blues, the russets and magentas; of the different fragrances, so recently applied, that mingle in the heady air — musks and florals and citruses, the woody smell of the cigar smokers.… And, above all that, the awareness that they are here on this floating world, apart from all other worlds, bound all of them by the country they have come from and the one they are going to, and by all the thousands of miles of travel that lie in between.

Dangerous Crossing feels entirely comfortable in its portrayal of 1939, and yet it’s the author’s first historical novel, so kudos there. I wish, though, she hadn’t told her story mostly in the present tense, because the shifts in time are sometimes jarring. Beyond that, though, she’s so sure-handed that I wonder why she included the prologue. Did she fear that her depiction of the competitive shipboard atmosphere, intensified by the heat of the southern latitudes, would fail to hold the reader? Did she not trust her skill at creating suspense without revealing that a crime has taken place?

Read Dangerous Crossing and decide for yourself.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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