Gothic suspense novel gets witty update in ‘Villa’
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the Villa Diodati in Switzerland during those three stormy days and nights in June 1816 when Mary Godwin Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and his personal physician, John Polidori, decided to alleviate their boredom by making up horror stories. The two great Romantic poets produced duds; in contrast, the two “amateurs” were in the zone. Polidori wrote what would be heralded as the first modern vampire tale, called simply “The Vampyre,” and Mary Shelley, of course, began churning out a masterpiece called “Frankenstein.”
That all the guests at the villa were so young and their personal lives so untidy has long made this gathering seem like a precursor to those legendary house parties of the rock ‘n’ roll era: for instance, the Rolling
Stones’ raucous residence in 1971 at the Villa Nellcôte in France, where they partied and worked on their classic album “Exile on Main St.” Percy Bysshe Shelley and Polidori were in their early 20s; Byron was the old man at 28, while Mary Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who’d tagged along, were the youngest at 18. Percy was still married to his first wife when he ran off with Mary. Claire had enjoyed, by her own account, a tryst of “ten minutes” with Bryon, and she was pregnant that summer; she also may have had something going on with her brother-in-law.
The celebrated events at the Villa Diodati serve as the template for Rachel Hawkins’ clever and wickedly fun new suspense novel, “The Villa.” Here’s the premise: A 30-something woman named Emily Sheridan, author of the moderately successful “Petal Bloom” mysteries, is going through a rough patch. Emily has run out of ideas for her cozy series and, adding to her misery, her dastardly ex-husband, Matt, is suing for a cut of her royalties, including any future books she may write. At Emily’s lowest moment, her erratic best friend since childhood, Chess Chandler, reappears in her life with this irresistible proposition: “You. Me. Italy.” Chess is a gorgeous best-selling author of self-help tomes with breezy titles like “You Got This!,” and she’s just rented the notorious Villa Aestas in Umbria for six weeks.
“Notorious” is a word that’s attached itself to the villa because of incidents that took place there in 1974, when rock star Noel Gordon rented the place for a careerrefreshing getaway. At this moment, all English majors, past and present, should feel their ears collectively pricking up, for Byron’s full name was “George Gordon, Lord Byron.” The echoes of the past keep on amplifying: During that long-ago summer, Noel invited a younger musician named (ahem) Pierce Sheldon to visit and perhaps collaborate with him; Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari Godwick (get it?) and her stepsister, Lara (with whom
Noel had had a fling), also came along. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll erupted until the summer abruptly ended in a suspicious drowning. (Double Jeopardy question: Which Romantic poet died by drowning?)
Hawkins clearly has a blast seeding her story with correspondences between the real-life bad behavior of those secondgeneration Romantics and the fictional rocker gathering in 1974. What makes “The Villa” even more deliciously ornate is how Hawkins sporadically quotes passages from the (fictitious) horror novel called “Lilith Rising” that Mari wrote in the aftermath of that blasted summer. Emily, who’s reading “Lilith Rising” in present-time, finds her friendship with Chess souring as their sojourn at Villa Aestas goes on. Indeed, as both women become mesmerized by the atmosphere of the villa, a murderous rivalry sparks between them.
“The Villa” is a moody labyrinth of a novel fortified by Hawkins’s evident knowledge of Gothic conventions: missing manuscripts, debauched aristocrats, isolated locales and the like. (She’s the author of two previous Gothic suspense novels and many more YA novels.) This is a spooky, intricate thriller to read for pure entertainment rather than for its striking prose or social commentary. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, think about the last time you were simply entertained by a good story.
In the hopeful promise of the new millennium, Pico Iyer became an essential and restless guide to the world that globalization was making. A hyper-eloquent and erudite son of many cultures, Iyer’s travel writing in the 1990s and early 2000s immersed readers in the farthest corners of a planet in transition. Books such as “Tropical Classical” and “The Global Soul” were international in scope and success. But over the past decade, Iyer’s once-roving gaze has turned curiously inward. In 2014, he published “The Art of Stillness” and argued that perhaps the greatest and most transformational form of elsewhere now lies in going “nowhere.” The book of staying home was an international bestseller and translated into 23 languages long before it became our mandated global reality.
Iyer’s latest – and his first to be published following the resumption of international travel – is “The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.” It’s a culmination of his shifting focus on inner journeys and an expansion of his argument that paradise is rarely found elsewhere. But unlike his slim book of stillness, this is a return to the open road: a grand, full-scale travelogue that traverses Iran, Sri Lanka and Japan before arriving at its final emotional destination. Like the author himself, it has multiple identities and registers – equally memoir, travelogue, cultural history and airport philosophy. It is also one of his very best.
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, into a family of Indian academics who eventually moved to Santa Barbara, California. A former journalist, he now lives in Kyoto with his Japanese wife, and his life across England, California and Asia has become a recurring thread in his work. There is a vintage, almost imperial quality to Iyer’s brand of wanderlust and a clear influence from the European Romantic tradition of finding and writing the self through far-flung grand tours. That kind of travel writing, however, can now feel dated and disconnected in its earnest, exclusively male self-absorption – not to mention tone deaf in a world of restricted access and rigid visa regimes. Fortunately, Iyer has remained both participant and critic of that privileged mode of travelogueing, and I’ve always found an electric charge of journalistic observation and acute political alertness in even his most romantic essays.
In a confessional mood, “The Half Known Life” breaks open Iyer’s journey to becoming a travel writer with the wistful tone of looking back at a younger, more assured self. The title is drawn from a line in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” about the mysteries and allure of that which we do not know. The book is haunted by Iyer’s lifelong obsession with pursuing paradise: searching for an external projection of refuge, beauty and peace through travel. The word “paradise” remains that most promising of advertising slogans for the likes of Bali, Barbados or Amalfi, and even with the indignities of modern travel, so many of us still take off in search of a temporary, Instagrammable slice of heaven.
Iyer writes about both that secular market for paradise and the religious pursuit of heaven or Nirvana in distant, monastic destinations
for the faithful.
The book opens with Iyer in the walled gardens of Iran’s ancient holy cities, where he’s come in search of the Islamic ideal of paradise, represented as architectural manifestations of Quranic gardens. Minders from the regime, however, are standing by at each turn, and it becomes abundantly clear that paradisiacal masterpieces from the past are policed by brutal forces from the present. As Iyer learns from conversations with Iranians, the Islamic republic is a “country where every road comes with speed bumps,” and despite his longings for Iran’s walled gardens, the lived experience, it turns out, does not afford him the paradise he seeks. In a later chapter set in Sri Lanka’s lush jungles amid ancient Buddhist statuary, the cemeteries of the genocidal civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority become stark reminders of a fallen paradise.
These early sections of the book can feel like fragmentary, rapid-fire visits to exotic destinations, punctuated with elliptical inner monologues and historical and literary asides. The writing, while always poetic, can feel unmoored and disorienting. As the book slows in its second half toward a majestic conclusion along the banks of the Ganges in the Hindu city of death, Varanasi, that structure becomes clearer in form and intention. The transition from confusion to clarity is by design. Like any great travelogue, “The Half Known Life” is a narrative cartography of personal growth and expansion. It is a work of spiritual evolution built around vivid, discernible images of real places by a master of description.
Iyer has always been one of my favorite carryon companions on travels, even when the books are not about the place on the itinerary. As he has aged into his recent body of work about inner life and silence, deeply inspired by his travels with the Dalai Lama and reflections on digital-age restlessness and political fracture, he has become a different kind of fellow traveler. This book is dedicated to Iyer’s late mother, who died in 2022, and published in a post-pandemic world of loss and frayed societies, even though it never explicitly references the disease.
To be honest, I was looking forward to returning to a vintage, aspirational brand of wanderlust with a great roving chronicler of elsewhere. Instead, “The Half Known Life” is a masterful merging of Iyer’s past and current concerns, a book of inner journeys told through extraordinary exteriors, of hopeful optimism for a world rooted in the paradise of being home.