|
The legend of the Sicilian Vespers has formed an important
part of Italian history and culture. On Easter Monday
of 1282, the citizens of Palermo rose up against their Angevin
(French) rulers, ultimately gaining independence for the Kingdom
of the Two Sicilies. One legend has it that the insurrection
began on the stroke of the vesper bell, when a French sergeant
molested a Sicilian woman and was fatally stabbed by her husband,
and a bloody massacre of the French followed. According
to another legend, the Sicilians would hold up a chick-pea and
asked anyone whom they suspected of being French, “tell us what
this is”; if the suspect could not pronounce cicirri
in the Sicilian manner, he was slaughtered where he stood.
The historical facts are somewhat more mundane. Rather
than a spontaneous uprising sparked off by a random act of vengeance,
the insurrection was provoked and funded by the Byzantine Emperor
Michael VIII, to avert an anticipated Angevin crusade to Constantinople.
Yet the Sicilians strongly supported the patriotic uprising
against an oppressive French regime, and the legend of the Sicilian
Vespers took on a new significance in the mid-19th Century as
a calling-cry for Italian nationalism in the lead-up to reunification
of the Italian state.
In 1854, Italy’s leading composer, Giuseppe Verdi, wrote
the score for the opera Ivespri Siciliani, to a libretto
based on the legend of the Sicilian Vespers. Italy’s national
anthem, composed in 1847 by Michele Novaro to words by the poet
Goffredo Maneli, contains the lyrics:
Every trumpet blast
Sounds the Sicilian Vespers.
Let
us gather in legions,
Ready to die!
Italy has called!
It is entirely fitting that Cedric Hampson has taken this
legend as the name for his most recent publication, an anthology
of short stories, following the success of his two novels Shifting
Shadows and Cat’s Eye. The legend of the Sicilian
Vespers - a legend based largely in fact, although embellished
to create a more compelling narrative - is not unlike the process
of authorship which Hampson describes as taking “an irregular
piece from the jigsaw of experience and ... fashion[ing] a mosaic
into which it smoothly fits”. At the same time, the cultural
heritage which has sprung from the legend of the Sicilian Vespers
is entirely appropriate to a work of high literary quality.
If Hampson had set out merely to write a book of diverting
yarns, the collection which he has produced would easily have
satisfied such a modest ambition. Nobody who buys this
book as bedtime reading risks the slightest disappointment.
The stories are uniformly engaging and entertaining, each
of them carrying an unpredictable twist in the tail.
But Hampson, being Hampson, placed no such limit on his aspirations.
Whilst many others would have been satisfied - indeed
proud - to have produced such a lively and enjoyable collection
of stories, Hampson has done much more than that. Sicilian
Vespers is literature of the first order. Three features,
in particular, stand out.
First, there is the extraordinary diversity of themes and
subject-matter. Geographically, the collection moves from
small communities in Western and Coastal parts of Queensland,
to Brisbane, Melbourne, Paris and Italy; from the farmhouse
to the courtroom, from the docks to the racecourse, from a restaurant
in Northern Italy to a brothel in Auckland. Stories of
murder, fraud, arson, blackmail and race-fixing are interspersed
with tales of the supernatural, and narratives which serve as
a gentle commentary on domestic life and interpersonal relations.
A second striking feature of Hampson’s writing is the wonderful
characterisations which he achieves, although deliberately painting
on such a small canvass. The sinister Kevin of On the
Road, the dogged Vic Stanley of Vic’s Last Bet, the
tragic Françoise of Paris, 1990, the saintly Father John
Caffery of The Brick, and the unrepentant trickster Cesare
Berlone of The Joker, are all rich three-dimensional
characters who would grace the pages of any full-scale novel.
Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, Hampson’s literary
style demonstrates use of the English language at its very best.
Hampson writes with a clarity and precision reminiscent
of Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb or G.K. Chesterton, yet in an
entirely contemporary vocabulary perfectly attuned both to his
own descriptive passages and to the dialogue which he attributes
to characters of various types and backgrounds.
The discipline required to write short stories is a rigorous
one - the prose equivalent of writing sonnets, or the literary
equivalent of engraving cameos. In Peter Shaffer’s play
Amadeus, the Emperor Joseph II says, “Too many notes,
my dear Mozart”, to which the maestro replies, “It has as many
notes as it requires - neither more nor less”. Similarly, Hampson’s
compositions are just as long as they need to be; there is not
a word out of place. Take, for example, Hampson’s concise
description of a police interview in The Brick:
“After two hours of exigent exploration Kenzel turned
on a tape recorder and with the aid of his notes conducted
a business-like question and answer interview in which Rudkin
seemed unprompted to bring forth treasures from the reconditory
of his mind. Next afternoon Rudkin returned
and signed the statement Kenzel had prepared from the taped
interview. Only then did Kenzel telephone Father John
Caffery who agreed to call at the police station to help
with inquiries the police were making into a complaint about
events at the college some time back.”
There is a temptation amongst lawyers to write about the
law, and especially amongst barristers to write about court
proceedings. It is a temptation which Hampson largely
resists. Of 14 stories, only two are set (wholly or in
part) in a courtroom, and those two are cleverly narrated from
a very different perspective than the author’s . Especially
convincing is Hampson’s description of a criminal trial, in
the story from which the anthology takes its name, Sicilian
Vespers. The story is narrated from the viewpoint of Maria,
an Italian immigrant, through whose eyes it is explained that:
“His [the
prisoner’s] avvocato trundled in: large and fat and red-faced,
his black coat and robe tinged green. His goat-hair headdress
was an ancient actor’s buskin and his smile, as he spoke with
[the prisoner], was as false and vile as the mafioso he was.”
and:
“Only the
high priest who was to preside over the ancient ceremony was
missing. [Maria] scrutinised his bench and chair set high
at one end. A wooden canopy stretched over it. The
high altar. ...
“Someone
called out and Maria joined the others in standing as a man
in a red robe followed a black robed woman through a door behind
the altar and took the highest seat. His goat-hair was
of a different pattern and his robe was trimmed with white fur;
rabbit, perhaps? His narrow face, angular and thrusting
with a beak-like nose and long chin, reminded her of a Sicilian
puppet.”
Cedric Hampson has produced a delightful anthology of stories,
which are sure to hold the attention of even the most intransigent
devotee of pulp fiction, whilst satisfying the most discriminating
reader’s yearn for literary quality. Once again, Hampson
has demonstrated that his talents as a wordsmith are just as
effective in writing fiction as in the courtroom.
|
