My Weekly Book

Medusa - Michael Dibdin

It turns out that before this I hadn’t read an Aurelio Zen novel since April, which came as a shock to me. Earlier this year I was galloping through them, delighted to have discovered such a good series. Then there was a little blip – covering the ending of Cosi fan Tutti and the entirety of A Long Finish where I really wasn’t enjoying reading them as much as I expected. Things improved with Blood Rain and And Then You Die - but I did have the distinct sense of a series that had lost its way, wandered out of the scope of the author’s original conception or even ceased to be entirely a roman policier altogether and moved on to wider issues. Or it could just be that I know there are not many more in front of me – now Back to Bologna only, and it could be that I have been slowing my pace of reading simply in order not to come to the end.

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The most striking thing about this particular Zen novel was a welcome change of mood and pace – at the outset the emphasis is off Zen’s personal life, which appears to have finally settled down a bit, and onto the case he is investigating. The case itself is a cunning and imaginative one with a twist that I didn’t see coming. For once, Zen is at the top of his game - what he intends to happen, happens, with just a little grease applied by him to the wheels of events. After novel after novel where he was stitched up, outmanoeuvered, humiliated or even the victim of another attempted assassination, this comes as welcome relief.

Perhaps the fact is that Dibdin and Zen are finally coming to terms with each other and are now able to happily co-exist rather than fighting each other. All the good things about the Dibdin oeuvre are here - sensuous language and description, an eye for the gothic, humour and a wonderful feeling of having penetrated a very dense and foreign culture. It would be nice to think that author and hero have made their peace - and I’ve heard very good things about Back to Bologna, so maybe it has the additional advantage of being true.

Some links:

• Contemporary Writers: Michael Dibdin
  
• Guardian review of Medusa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.