If Martin Booth's new novel A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN is a bestseller, expect Italy to become a highly popular tourist destination. His narrator, an international criminal, spends the novel alternately enticing you to join him high in the Italian Apennines and cautiously warning you from trying to find him.
The novel's setting, a small, unnamed, rural Italian village, is exquisite and exquisitely rendered. Booth takes time to describe precisely and poetically the old wine shop run by a maniacal dwarf and an obedient giant, the ancient apothecary whose floorboards have absorbed centuries of spills, and the historic piazzas that inspire nothing but nonchalance in the townspeople who visit them every day.
Clarke, which is not the narrator's real name but an alias, poses as a painter of butterflies, a Nabokovian occupation that allows for such eccentricities as long absences, erratic behavior, and no set schedule. So he often lounges and partakes of local delicacies --- the wine, the home-smoked prosciutto, his two mistresses, all of which he describes in tantalizing detail --- while he practices his true calling. Clarke's real profession is much more sinister than painting insects, although equally artistic. He doesn't reveal it until almost 100 pages in, but hints, "I am the salesman of death ... I do not cause it. I merely arrange for its delivery. I am death's booking-clerk, death's bellhop."
Despite his obsession with privacy and death, Clarke is an endlessly entertaining narrator, and his insights into the international underworld and the human condition are intriguing. "Everyone is a terrorist," he observes. "Everyone carries a gun in his heart. Most do not fire simply because they have no cause to pursue."
Booth's rendering of his narrator's voice is remarkable, both for its consistency and for its intricacy. Not only does Clarke keep his guard up through the novel's course, he also manages to convey a great deal about his antihero without him realizing it. Clarke admits his deception to the reader: "The names are changed, the places changed, the people changed. There are a thousand Piazzas di S. Teresa, ten thousand alleys that have no names ... You will not find me."
But Clarke seems unaware of his own self-deception: while he is astute and witty, he can also occasionally be self-important and even boorish in justifying his very private lifestyle. And he studiously avoids cultivating any lasting human connections while wondering how to make his mark on the world, never realizing that to do one is to ensure the other. But his shortcomings become the book's strengths, for as he contemplates life and death in Italy, his flaws --- and his own ignorance of them --- reveal his surprising depth and complex humanity.
Booth makes A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN more than just a postcard from Italy; the setting has direct thematic relevance to the story. History is not just a recurring motif, but a character in itself, an antagonist who constantly reminds Clarke of his encroaching mortality. What better place to set such a face-off than in the seat of Western history, the land where the Knights Templar roamed, where abandoned castles and churches litter the terrain. Even the view from his window captures eras past: "What I can see, with my pair of compact pocket Yashica binoculars, are five thousand years of history laid out before me as if it were a tapestry upon a cathedral wall, an altar-cloth to the god of time spread over the world."
Ultimately, even the passage of time becomes a delicacy in A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN. With a watchmaker's precision, Booth has written a suspenseful and intricate tale, one that is as inviting as it is cautionary.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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