Pretentious wanker!”
These kind words were scrawled on the proofs of my new novel. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but this less-than-generous verdict on the author was from his wife (to whom the book is dedicated) and it occurred shockingly early on: on the title page, in fact. She was referring to the subtitle: “a diptych”.
It is no longer there in the published version of the book, partly because it would have invited more incisive critical derision—dipstick!—but mainly because the book is so clearly a diptych that there is no need to advertise it as “a picture or other work of art consisting of two parts facing one another like the pages of a book and usually hinged together” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Art And Artists).
Worlds apart? Dyer found visual similarities between Varanasi (above) and Venice; the London-based author in Venice. Photographs by AFP and Rebecca Wilson
Appropriating an art term like this was not entirely pretentious—or was at least justifiably so—because the first part of the book takes place during the vernissage of the Venice Biennale. I went there in 2003 with my wife, who worked for an art magazine. We had a fantastic time and after two or three days I had the idea of doing a version of Thomas Mann’s
Death In Venice, set during these first, frantic, party-intensive days of the biennale. Whereas Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio is never explicitly or simply sexual—is the boy an incarnation of the ideal beauty the composer strives to attain in his art?—in my version the “romance” would be heterosexual and unambiguously carnal.
The weather played a part in this: The freakish heat wave of the 2003 biennale created an intensification of the fever or mania that Venice, according to Gabriele D’Annunzio, has a unique capacity to excite (I included this quote as an epigraph but, like the subtitle, it was deleted from the final version).
In The Uncommon Reader, George Steiner writes that “latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply”. My previous novel, Paris Trance, had been a version of—or reply to—Tender is the Night, one of my favourite books of all time. In this instance, Mann’s novella didn’t mean a great deal to me. Nor did Visconti’s overrated film. David Thomson is right: It is somehow assumed that the swelling Mahler music “in which the film is washed must have been written by Visconti himself, inspired by his own footage”. An even larger transfer of creative ownership has occurred with Mann’s text: It has gone from being a book by an author to a mythic template, familiar to everyone, irrespective of whether they have actually read it.