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Review by James William Brown
The neighborhood roads, or strade vicinali of Italy, Barry Unsworth tells us, are often scrappy country lanes which exist mainly to link together a few rural houses or villas. In his After Hannibal, an assortment of foreigners and Italians have settled along the strade vicinali of rural Umbria, and their lives there, like the roads, begin to intersect.
A dispute over just such a road drives this light comedy of manners and culture clashes. When a stone wall crumbles, partially blocking the road, the crafty Checchetti clan tries to force a local English couple into paying for repairs. Turning the matter over to their Machiavellian lawyer, Mancini, the couple assumes the matter concluded. But they soon find that the road dispute is a kind of thread which, once tugged, begins to unravel the fabric of their own lives and to expose those of their neighbors.
These include a retired American couple whose dream house is being destroyed by an English "buildings expert," a gay Italian involved in a property dispute, a German expatriate trying to excavate himself from war memories, and an Italian scholar burying himself in Renaissance history amid the ruin of his marriage.
At the center of the disputes and personal problems of the neighborhood sits lawyer Mancini. He openly warns his clients that only he will profit from their legal squabbles because Italians, ". . . have no belief that the law or the police or the public administration exist to serve them. These institutions do not themselves believe that they exist to serve anybody."
Because of this, he recommends the development of furbizia (cunning) -- far more useful than honesty in the settlement of disputes. This is a hard lesson to learn, but not for Mancini who, alone of all the characters, has mastered it brilliantly.
This is Barry Unsworth's twelfth novel, and it's a lighter one than most. But he clearly understands both the symbolic and practical content of the dream of a house of one's own on a quiet road, the lengths we'll go to in order to realize that dream, and how the dream can blind us to realities. For, as Mancini knows, ". . . the real thief of dreams was not the one you feared, but the one you trusted . . . "
If the road traveled in After Hannibal seems one taken before with the likes of Peter Mayle or Tim Parks, its detours and potholes are still funny, as long as you're not the one stuck in them. The important thing about roads, Unsworth writes, ". . . is not where they end but the lives they touch on the way."
There is that familiar sense in After Hannibal, that Mediterranean communities are often like lenses through which we can view the rest of the world, but in small, as if we were looking at it through binoculars held the wrong way round.
James William Brown is the author of the novel Blood Dance (Harcourt Brace).
©1997, ProMotion, inc.