Donna Leon's latest 'Brunetti' novel: Confronting a changing world
A fter a quarter-century, Donna Leon and the readers of her Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series have settled into a comfortable relationship, much like her fictional detective and his wife, Paola.
The Waters of Eternal Youth
By Donna Leon
Atlantic Monthly Press. 304 pp. $26.
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Reviewed by Michael D. Schaffer
nolead ends A fter a quarter-century, Donna Leon and the readers of her Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series have settled into a comfortable relationship, much like her fictional detective and his wife, Paola.
Leon's writing satisfies, much like the dishes that come out of Paola's kitchen. It goes down easily. Her characters are reassuringly familiar and likable, if a little too good to be true. Don't look to Leon for dysfunctional crime solvers like Inspector Morse or Harry Hole or Lisbeth Salander.
Brunetti operates in a world weary with mistrust and compromised ideals. In The Waters of Eternal Youth, he muses that a German journalist of his acquaintance living in Venice "had arrived at a point of such cynicism as almost to make him an Italian."
Brunetti can play a cynical hand himself, as he shows this time out when he uses his connections to the rich and powerful of Venice to manipulate his social-climbing boss, but his ideals remain essentially intact. His object in working the boss is to get him to reopen a long-closed case.
An elderly contessa, a dear friend of Brunetti's mother-in-law's, has asked Brunetti to investigate the near-drowning of her granddaughter Manuela in a Venetian canal 15 years earlier. The incident left Manuela, who was 15 at the time, brain-damaged and stuck forever at the mental age of 7. A police investigation at the time concluded the event was an accident, but as Brunetti looks closer, he begins to have doubts.
A local drunk who dove into the canal and saved Manuela's life said at first he had seen another man "push or throw her into the water," the contessa tells Brunetti. When the drunk sobered up the next day, however, he couldn't remember anything about another man. Brunetti tracks down Manuela's rescuer by phone, but when the detective shows up to interview him in person, he finds the rescuer has been murdered. And when he finally tracks down the report on Manuela from the hospital where she was taken after her rescue, he finds more evidence that her near-drowning was no accident.
The investigation turns out to be a straightforward affair, and Leon drops a hint or two along the way that allows the reader the satisfaction of figuring things out along with Brunetti - or even feeling a step ahead of the commissario. The crimes themselves - the original assault on Manuela, her near-drowning, and the subsequent murder years later of her rescuer - are the unplanned results of a brutal mixture of lust and stupidity.
Leon is not one for elaborate murder plots that require a chain of events. Like the great 20th-century crime writer Raymond Chandler (whose essay "The Simple Art of Murder" should be required reading for every mystery novelist), Leon treats murder as a simple (if evil) thing.
In some ways, the Brunetti novels are as much about a family confronting a world that is changing in troubling ways as they are about solving crimes. There's the environment, for one thing - a major concern of Brunetti's "ecologically minded children who pounded violently on the door of the bathroom the moment he entered the second minute of a shower."
But the big social concern in The Waters of Eternal Youth is Italy's immigration crisis. In a digression from the main narrative, Brunetti's daughter tells him she is frightened of an aggressive African panhandler who has been asking for money outside her school, putting his hand on her arm as he asks. "Brunetti didn't like the idea of any man putting his hand uninvited on his daughter's arm. He realized how atavistic his response was and didn't care in the least." The commissario sends a colleague, the "thick-necked, ham-fisted" Vianello, to warn the man away from the school.
This is not very Brunettilike behavior. The commissario considers himself a man of logic and later lectures Vianello about the weakness of the argument that immigrants "impoverish us as a country, take all of the money that should be ours. And our jobs and our women. . . . In logic, that's the appeal to fear."
Vianello's dry response: "Lot of that around, isn't there?"
It's a worthy question for man of logic who tries to keep his cynicism within bounds. Brunetti just nods.
Michael D. Schaffer is a former Inquirer book editor.