Fire and Brimstone and all that

The week before Winnie arrived, I was desperate to finshThe Volcano by Venero Armanno. This was mostly because the book weighed almost two kilos in hardcover and I didn't think I could hold both it and the baby. It wasn't really because of the plot because you knew pretty well what was going to happen from the beginning.

The book tells the story of Emilio Aquila, a Sicilian post-War immigrant to Brisbane who got caught up with a crime lord and with union-busting railway management. Along the way he could never really shake the nickname "Devil of Sicily" he got as a youngster for living as a brigand on Mt Etna and kidnapping a girl who then had to marry him.

This was published about five or six years ago and I used to see a lot of people reading it in public. It has a lovely cover and sounds like a terribly PC postcolonial immigrant tale. But I was put off from reading it then. This was partly because the reviews talked about the use of ancient mythology (Pluto kidnapped Proserpine on the slopes of Mt Etna and took her to the Underwold to be his queen except she wasn't happy which is kinda sorta what happened to the protagonist and his wife) and I'm dubious about modern novels using myths because it's hard to do it well. But in this book, it wasn't that heavy handed and it did work.

And there were a lot of good things going on that I enjoyed a great deal such as descriptions of migrant life in Brisbane in the 1950s where the locals were as casually and unapologetically racist as you'd expect. Life in Sicily during the war sounded very grim too. Where the book did lose me though was in the present where Emilio befriends an annoying young woman who's trying to study creative writing and is depressed after the death of a boyfriend. Some of this - such as her discussions with her incompetent supervisor - is meant to be funny but it doesn't really work for me and I got annoyed that she had not one but two artist boyfriends.

So, a lot of pages, a lot of story, a lot of great background research but ultimately unsatisfying.