Ascension by Gregory Dowling

At once a historical novel, a paean to Venice, and a thriller, Gregory Dowling's new novel Ascension is both entertaining and painlessly instructive. Dowling wears his formidable learning, which is not derived solely from scholarship but also includes a deep lived knowledge of Venice, lightly. Looked at from one angle, this novel can be read as a comedy of manners. Seen from another, it's a vivid guidebook to a particular place and period, with Dowling's engaging hero, Alvise Marangon, serving as cicerone not only to British tourists in the 1740s but to us 21^st-century readers. Bilingual and bicultural, Alvise bears a pleasant resemblance to his creator, though Dowling had much more formal education. Both Alvise and Dowling seem able to leap through centuries—forward in one case, backward in the other—and to take us along for a fascinating ride.

The presiding spirit of Ascension is, as I've said, comic—comic not only in its lively pacing and in some slapstick-inflected scenes of peril, but also, and more significantly, in its sharp observations of human behavior, observations which someone who straddles two languages and cultures is particularly well placed to make. Alvise's canny psychology may not earn him a decent living as an artist, but it helps him deal with the challenges of coping with befuddled tourists, and proves particularly useful when it comes to spying. The complicated plot of Ascension, which concerns a demented nobleman's terrorist conspiracy to assassinate the Doge by blowing up a procession and all its participants, is almost secondary to one's enjoyment of the novel's other qualities. Not only our hero Alvise but also other characters—the laconic gondolier Bepi, the bookseller Fabrizio and his lively daughter Lucia, the austere and yet somehow also owlish spymaster and bureaucrat the Missier Grande, "responsible for law and order throughout the city"—are memorable and vivid even without the labyrinthine ramifications of the plot.

And yet that plot itself, with its elements of histrionic megalomania, antiquarian zeal, and mystical gobbledygook, turns out to be both engaging and pertinent. For Alvise himself is possessed of considerable histrionic talent. An underlying enjoyment of putting on a show, of masks and disguises and assumed names, bubbles away cheerfully beneath the surface of the narrative, not restricted to a single character.

The very city of Venice, this novel suggests, brings out the performer in everyone, even in itself. As Dowling wrote in his Foreword to his 1991 novel Every Picture Tells a Story, "Venice may seem [imaginary] but is not."

How likely are the events which constitute the plot of Ascension? Dowling writes in his End Note to the novel, "I have done my best to convey the atmosphere of 18^th-century Venice as accurately as possible," which doesn't precisely answer that question. The murders of gnaghe, the fanatical conspiracies of a deranged and impoverished nobleman, the plot to blow up a procession with a primitive form of submarine—Dowling doesn't say that these events happened, but I suspect that they could have. As Aristotle tells us, history is only the account of what happened, but poetry tells us what might happen. And how much we learn along the way! Dowling's useful Glossary tells us that gnaga is a Venetian term for a male prostitute "who dressed in female clothes with cat-masks," but the text of the novel has already informed me as much, in a more entertaining if indirect way.

Occasionally the cicerone in Alvise, or in his creator, seems mildly at odds with the pace of the narrative, as when a long paragraph informs us about "the complicated rules that regulated the various kinds of eating and drinking establishments in the city." Who is the beneficiary of this information about the distinctions between furatole, luganegheri, magazeni, and malvasie? The remarkable thing is that one continues to suspend disbelief and to absorb information—and by the end of the paragraph, when the topic of the latest murder of a...