50 Book Challenge: book 10
A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin
Oh, this is a funny one. To stick to the material facts for a moment, it is the sixth book in the series by this author featuring the Italian detective Aurelio Zen. I have been consuming them with an enthusiasm usually reserved for products containing rather more chocolate than your average paperback book generally does. It covers the period between the end of Zen’s posting to Naples, as described in Cosi fan Tutti, and his posting to, er, somewhere else probably best not revealed right now. It is followed by the famous (or possibly the infamous) Blood Rain which should offer a clue to those in the know about the nature of the posting.
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Most readers will recognise that awful, sinking feeling of a series they have really been enjoying starting to go down the pan. I got a big dose of it when I realised that my dissatisfaction at the ending of Cosi fan Tutti was going to carry right on into this book. The story is set in northern Italy, in the Piedmont wine-growing region. Some readers have evidently found all the wine-making paraphernalia an annoyance: I was not one of those. I was too busy being hung up on the things that were really getting me down.
The setup is perfunctory and unconvincing. The mystery itself is confusing – I had to go back after I finished it and skim-read it again, which I resented. The psychological process that Zen goes through, always a major character in its own right, is horribly off-key. The dense, dream-like atmosphere in which you are unsure what is real, what is imagined and what is deliberate misdirection, the very thing pulled off so marvellously in Dead Lagoon, totally misses its target this time around. Even the writing seems to lack its usual sparkle.
And the worst of it is, if you picked this up cold, you would probably think it was quite good. The central premise, of a rural community determined to look after its own and repel outsiders at the cost of concealing a murderer, is a really good one. It’s not a bad book in itself. It’s just terrible in the light of the expectations Dibdin has built up over the previous five novels. And that’s a nasty trick to play on your readership
There was a plot development at the end of Cosi fan Tutti that I thought was simply ridiculous. It is compounded here. In that book certain key facts about Zen’s past and background were revealed in an offhand, desultory manner which seemed to me to undermine the previous five novels’ worth of careful plotting and character development. Here it happens again. Although there is, to be fair, a further twist to come which redeems things a bit.
Undermining Zen has always been a hallmark of Dibdin’s and in this story we are treated to a murderer’s-eye-view of certain events which leads up to a sting-in-the-tale ending that readers may or may not feel is satisfying (personally I feel ambivalent about it, which is probably high praise, in the light of the rest of this). There are flashes of humour but they are pale in comparison to past flashes. Zen’s murder investigation is phoned in and the tactics he uses to extract confessions and intimidate witnesses are ridiculously heavy-handed.
I understand Blood Rain is pretty well thought of. I’m very glad about that. This one’s for the completist, or to be read quickly for the plot which you’ll have trouble following beyond this point without it. Otherwise, go and read one of the good ones instead.