Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.

In the novel’s protagonist and its settling we have two cusps: the cusp of a new decade and the cusp of adulthood. The Michelino we meet is of an age when horror and mystery are at their most thrilling and he avidly reads novels and histories across these themes. Consequently, the tone of the book has a Gothic air to it, as though it was written many decades earlier. It put me in mind of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Michelino doesn’t name check that specific novel; he refers to authors such as Lovecraft, Hoffman and Poe. Poe’s works I know anecdotally, so I understood the references made to them later in this novel. Lovecraft and Hoffman I know in the abstract, so had an idea of where this tale was pulling from.

Michelino’s grandparents employ a groundsman called Felice. Michelino is fascinated by this man, referring to him as ‘the verdigris man’ because of the way he mixes up copper acetate to use as a fungicide in the garden, seemingly impervious to its toxicity. Felice is also a slug killer and rabbit skinner, a man with a disfigured face, a heavy drinker and the sorrowful victim of memory loss. He’s a man with a long association with the estate, the previous owner of which told Michelino’s grandfather that Felice had always been there. Michelino considers Felice to be some kind of monster. Felice loves Michelino, which the boy is glad of, because “to be loved by a monster is the best possible protection from the horrific world.”

Michelino narrates from the present, looking back on his past, and his adult recollection occasionally jars with the telling of a story about an early teen. The 13 and a half year old Michelino is precocious, describing himself as a “fledgling aesthete”. I had the feeling, though, that 50 year old Michelino is presenting his adult recollection of the boy he used to be, and manipulating the story in an attempt to make it make sense.

He expects us to believe that his 13 and a half year old self would have knowledge of what appears to be dementia to a sufficient level that he can attempt to put in place the type of memory prompts that might help an older man retain his present and reclaim his near past. Michelino treats Felice as an experiment as much as a mystery to solve, someone to discover and test. It was this curiosity about Felice as an unknown quantity that made me think of Frankenstein. Michelino is almost creating and animating Felice from his observations of and conversations with the gardener.

I think the method chosen to aid Felice’s powers of recall upset me because it bears a strong resemblance to the method my mum used: the sticking up of prompts on any available surface. My mum’s kitchen was papered with Post-It notes and scraps of paper with incomprehensible aides-mémoir that weren’t allowed to be removed, despite having no meaning, even to mum as their writer. I was surprised by how quickly the trauma of that period of her mental decline came back to me. As in the book, with Michelino’s story about the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini being slapped as a five year old by his father in order to embed the memory of a lesson, I might think I’ve moved on from that moment in my past but the trauma means I can’t truly forget it. And this notion of trauma embedding memory is the thrust of Mari’s novel.

Things take a number of bizarre turns as the story progresses, some of them horrifically funny thanks to the misunderstandings that arise from Michelino’s attempts to help Felice with his memory. On one occasion, Felice decapitates the estate’s old rooster, presenting himself before Michelino’s grandfather with hands dripping blood and announcing that he has “done in” the boy, a confusion stemming from the association of Michelino’s name with a toy rooster.

Felice’s war against the red slugs, which he refers to as French slugs, is revealed to be something to do with the father he wants so much to remember. Somehow the French had committed a crime against the father that Felice couldn’t recall, only feel deeply as an ongoing insult. Michelino attempts to ban Felice from killing the slugs, which leads to a very particular horror later in the story.

Michelino acknowledges that his mnemonic system of memory prompts is a failure when it leads not to an improvement in Felice’s recollection but rather to the boy and the man “entering a dimension where logic, experience, chronology, and the laws of physics had all lost value.” The system triggers memories, potentially false, of the Russians who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and settled at the estate now owned by Michelino’s grandparents, of a Neapolitan folk  singer, of Napoleonic Hussars, and of the murder of retreating SS Officers at the end of the Second World War. It prompts Felice to claim he can hear the dead buried under the lawn and the orchards speaking to him in French. It bears with it the possibility that Felice is a supernatural being, much older than is humanly possible, although of course the truth turns out to be more mundane and tragic than that. Michelino starts questioning the point of his attempts to unpick the mystery of Felice’s monstrosity.

Was it really worth teaching him how to recall the taste of a sausage or the name of a vegetable, if in so doing we found ourselves surrounded by Russians, by Frenchmen, by the dead, by mischievous and malevolent spirits who had fun at our expense with their linguistic babel?

He switches tack to using the discarded possessions of the Russians, who disappeared completely on selling the estate to his grandfather. Asking Felice to hold certain items unleashes fantastical tales of a Great Rabbit that raised Felice and something lurking in the cellar that Felice believes killed the first version of Michelino’s grandfather. Although that first grandfather turns out not to really be dead, or even corporeally real. Michelino has already explored the cellars in a boyish attempt to stir up his imagination, challenging unknown monsters in the dark to make themselves known. When he decides to look into Felice’s claim by exploring by torchlight, he discovers a barrel of slugs which he attempts to kill with chunks of verdigris. He doesn’t get the result he hopes for.

Michelino turns to a local woman, Carmen, for information about Felice’s youth and the Russians who used to own his grandparents’ estate. She is reluctant to speak about the past, however, so Michelino heads for the local archives. These are less use than he had hoped, starting only in 1923 with the formation of a new municipal area under the Fascists. All records before that date were apparently destroyed. Authoritarian régimes that want to derive meaning from a reimagined past have a tendency to destroy the evidence of a less convenient actual past.

I was thinking the other day of the way the past telescopes in and out. I was thinking in particular of the albums I listened to as a teenager and still listen to now. It seems strange to know that they are 40 years old, when albums by bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones felt like they were from the ancient past at the time, despite only 20 years having passed. This novel made me think about what it must have been like to be born after a major war and to be a teenager among people whose experience of that war means 20 years ago was nothing.

The past telescopes in and out differently in Verdigris, thanks to the fractured and unreliable memories Michelino gleans from Felice. The story reaches a point, however, where the fractured, writhing past of Felice’s recollection coagulates into something stable. The voices beneath the lawn have bones. Felice’s memory loss stretches back towards childhood and an incident in which his childish gullibility is to someone else’s advantage.

At the end of the novel, Mari draws from the threads of the narrative an ending that is both chilling and ludicrous. It’s an ending that can be accepted as a form of truth by surrendering to the fantastical or explained away as mere fantasy. Michelino will either wake up a monster himself or the same boy he ever was.

After a difficult start, in which I restarted the book twice in as many days, I ended up fascinated by this tale. I’m sure I would have got different things from it had I the knowledge of the writers that Mari draws inspiration from, but my lack of familiarity with those writers didn’t prevent me deriving enjoyment from the story. It has made me more curious to read Poe. Lovecraft less so. It also owes debts to British and Celtic folklore, as well as to writers of Gothic adventure, like Robert Louis Stevenson (author of Michelino’s favourite book) and Bram Stoker. It lacks the magical realism, but I also found similarities with Louis de Bernières’s books set on Kefalonia and in Turkey.

It’s a strange book but oddly beautiful in its twists and turns. Given the luxury of time to read it in one sitting and to suspend the realism that adulthood forces us to adopt, I’m sure I would have felt the same shivers that Michelino describes and that I remember from my own teenage fascination with horror stories.

Read 26/03/2024-01/04/2024

08/40 books to read in 2024