The next best thing to looking down from the Rialto is to see Venice through the eyes of someone who lives there. And if, like Donna Leon, that person has lived in Venice for 30 years and has spent time in other flavoursome places, the chances are that she will know what to look out for. If she also has an eye for the telling detail and an ear for the patterns of speech, we shall gain much from being in her company.
Donna Leon has more to offer. A marked feature of her writing is her awareness that words are only part of the story when a conversation takes place. The body has its own language. So do the silences that earn their keep in an interview.
These observations come to mind as a result of my just having read a couple more of Donna Leon’s detective stories. Ask what her books are about and the reply has to be: ’Venice’. The detective story is a vehicle that enables the narrator to move from waterway to waterway, from bridge to bridge. We almost become Venetians when we follow an inquiry being made by Commissario Brunetti into misdeeds that mar the enchantment of the queen of the Adriatic.
Yet Venetians are like the rest of us. They have secrets, anxieties, disappointments. They worry about their children, about pollution, about the effect tourists are having on their favoured location. And these things show when they are being interviewed by Brunetti. Their body language, their gestures their nervous movements, their eye activity have something to contribute. In one sequence Brunetti is watching a recording of an interview on a screen. He presses the mute button, hears nothing but sees all. When the recording has run its course, he has already gathered all he wants to know without hearing any of the dialogue.
We read detective stories for enjoyment. They are easy reading. They also have much to offer in our day-to-day contact with our fellow human-beings. If we are perceptive, we can learn much, perhaps not as much as a dedicated observer like Sherlock Holmes but enough for make our days interesting. And we may even find ourselves set thinking by that unusual story of Jesus writing in the ground with his finger (John 8). We have what may be described as a pregnant pause, one of those silent moments that, as we have said, earn their keep. There is much to provoke thought in this incident, which has no certain place in the text and probably gains all the more magnetism from this uncertainty.
TRANSFORMED TOWER
Fire put paid to Christ Church, Gipsy Hill, London in 1982. The church was rebuilt. The question then became: what shall we do with the tower (which had survived the fire)? The answer was: turn it into residential accommodation. So the tower gained two additional midget towers alongside the original and a lift. Four handsome stages are now in use as a dwelling-place called Highland Tower. It is a landmark and the view from the top is sublime. The Vicar is Jonathan Croucher.
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