The Good Italian
By Stephen Burke
John Murray Publishing €24.85
What a pleasant surprise it is to read a debut Irish novel that’s not only not set on some wretched rural smallholding in landlord times, it’s not set in Ireland at all.
The Good Italian, the first novel by Dubliner Stephen Burke, is a historical novel all right, but it takes place in what was the Italian colony of Eritrea in the 1930s. The characters are Italian and Eritrean. He doesn’t even mention Ireland outside the acknowledgments. It’s intoxicating.
Our hero is Enzo Secchi, efficient if underemployed master of the country’s torpid main port at Massawa. Enzo is shy and solitary, alone at home with his Caruso records. On the recommendation of his soldier friend Salvatore, he hires an Eritrean woman to clean and cook and share his bed.
The idea is to create a business arrangement convenient to both parties. However, Enzo falls in love with his new housekeeper, Aatifa, gradually eroding her long-
standing, mysterious reserve, until she falls for him too.
The Italians pursued ambitious but not altogether fruitful colonial plans in Africa. They conquered Eritrea – strategically important for its Red Sea location – in 1890, but had their asses kicked when they tried to invade Ethiopia a few years later.
As the novel opens, in 1935, Mussolini is reawakening the vision of a vast Italian colony in east Africa. Troops begin arriving at Enzo’s port in preparation for another attempt on Ethiopia, and a new law is declared banning relations between Italians and Eritreans. Enzo and Aatifa are driven to secrecy, but it can’t last long.
There’s an elegance to the characters of The Good Italian. Even amid their flaws – and they are all flawed, thankfully, for the sake of narrative substance – they behave with a quiet, deliberate consciousness.
And yet behind all the seemliness there’s quite a thumping plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, the timid hero is rewarded with courage, the corrupt anti-hero gets a last chance to show integrity. And there’s a war.
Burke is better known as a filmmaker, and you can tell. The novel moves cinematically from scene to scene, and there are mental pictures that stay with you: The lumbering train ride up the mountain to Asmara; the use of mustard gas on Ethiopian soldiers; the garden of Haile Sellassie’s former palace in Addis Ababa, where an assassination attempt on the Italian viceroy leads to a massacre; an execution scene in a prison yard.
Ethiopia remained under Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941. Eritrea, meanwhile, did not secure its independence (from Ethiopia) until 1993. It’s a fascinating era of history, and as well as being an enthralling read, Burke’s novel will whet your appetite to learn more about it.