Plot thickens Michael Ennis’ ‘Malice of Fortune’
The cast of Michael Ennis' new novel The Malice of Fortune includes, among other Renaissance celebrities, the great political genius Niccolo Machiavelli, the artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci and a handful of genially toxic Borgias. For all their star power, however, none of these characters is as interesting as a mostly invented prostitute named Damiata.
That fact provides a tidy summary of the book's merits and flaws: In the rare moments when Ennis is writing pure fiction, his story zips along, a pleasure, whereas the trudging entrance of history is a sure sign of impending tedium.
The Malice of Fortune begins in Rome in 1502. Its first narrator is the same Damiata, a beautiful courtesan who, at the pope's cruel behest, must travel to Imola. The arms, heads and legs of dead women have started to appear in the city — murders that may be connected with an event in Damiata's past.
In Imola, she meets the book's second narrator, Machiavelli, a political envoy hoping to negotiate the struggle between Cesare Borgia, son of the pope, and Vitellozzo Vitelli, a spruced-up warlord, two men who are both trying to seize sovereignty over Italy's fractured map. (Ultimately Machiavelli would write The Prince, his landmark text of cynical political philosophy, in part about Borgia.)
He and Damiata, with the cryptic aid of da Vinci, join forces to catch a murderer and save their country, though neither is ever certain of the other's good faith.
This highly abridged recap — even if Ennis had set out specifically to write a book immune to summary, it is hard to imagine him exceeding this effort — makes The Malice of Fortune sound like a blockbuster. And at times it even reads like one. Ennis is an uncommonly graceful writer (a white silk shirt "was so wet that it had become a milky membrane, clinging to his great chest") and a conscientious researcher, his pages full of decisive period details.
What he cannot command — yet — is the pacing of a novel. Endless stretches of The Malice of Fortune move with all the speed of Michaelangelo's David in a footrace, and even the usual elements of Renaissance mischief, from sex to drugs to violence, can't spice them up. How can a book so overstuffed with plot pass so slowly? The question answers itself; the book has too many stories to tell and, save the moments when our investment in Damiata anchors one of them emotionally, none has any momentum.
Like many historical novels of its kind, The Malice of Fortune is dotted with words in its characters' language, Italian in this instance. It's hard to see the point of them — they are there to offer authenticity, but in fact they have the opposite effect, reminding us of the artificiality of a book in English and narrated by Italians. (And then, does even a very dim reader feel sophisticated to have words like mappa and invenzione italicized on his behalf?)
This kind of historical filigree, in which Ennis excels, is exciting to some. They should pick up The Malice of Fortune. For the rest of us, it might be better to wait for his next book, which, this one hints, could have greatness in it.
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Charles Finch is the author of Burial at Sea.