In These 3 Novels, Power Struggles in Every Era

[Pelican Press 0]

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In These 3 Novels, Power Struggles in Every Era

“You now understand what power truly is. The discovery has spread through you like poison.” Years later, the ruthless warlord Cesare Borgia’s remark will cast its shadow over Niccolò Machiavelli’s notorious 16th-century political treatise, “The Prince.” At least that’s the impression you get from Franco Bernini’s engrossing novel, THE THRONE (Europa, 416 pp., $30), translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky. It’s just the first in a projected trilogy set in an era whose notions of statecraft can seem even more rapacious than our own.

A lowly bureaucrat, hardly able to support his family, the Machiavelli we meet in these pages is hardly, well, Machiavellian. Deep in debt and desperate to escape an ********* hired by the husband of one of his many lovers, he’s glad to be sent on an ill-funded and probably fruitless mission by the Florentine authorities, who want him to spy on Borgia. But when Borgia in turn hires Machiavelli for a clandestine writing project (ostensibly to counter slander but mainly to create a fearsome public image), the hapless envoy finds himself both attracted to and repelled by his collaborator. Machiavelli concludes that Borgia “is a *******, but his cruelty can be used for both good and bad.” Yet when Machiavelli dares to befriend the desperate young woman who is Borgia’s latest war trophy, the bad may come to outweigh the good.

As he maneuvers between a shifting cast of patrons and enemies, aware that “his humble birth is like an invisible border that can’t be crossed,” Machiavelli gradually becomes our guide to an Italy that is “after all only a name.” With increasing frustration, he describes its fractured patchwork of warring territories, “each one wanting the ****** of their neighbor more than their own life, always so petty, lacking in greatness, never thinking of the future.”

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In Depression-era Seattle, it’s also every man for himself — or so it seems to the cub reporter who narrates Robert Dugoni’s historical thriller A ******** ON THE HILL (Thomas & Mercer, 366 pp., $28.99). It’s the late spring of 1933, and William “Shoe” Shumacher has been in the city for just a year, working for a relative’s afternoon newspaper and sending part of his paltry salary home to his impoverished family. So when Shoe gets a tip from Chief Detective Ernie Blunt about a ******* at an exclusive speakeasy, it could be the break he’s been waiting for. After all, he gets paid a penny for every inch of copy.

The elements of a scandalous ****** are everywhere: a dubiously employed moll who could be a ringer for Jean Harlow, a former boxer with big money problems, a nattily dressed gangster insisting he shot his assailant in self-defense and the ******** nightclub whose patrons are rumored to include the mayor, various council members and even the chief of police. But as the gangster’s trial unfolds, Shoe begins to wonder whether more ******* are being camouflaged by this one. Has he been lied to? Played for a *******? Will he too succumb to the rampant greed that infects everyone from the shoeshine boy to the judge? “With the underworld,” Shoe realizes, “you knew the players and what to expect from each. It was the people you didn’t know, the upstanding citizens of Seattle, some sworn to protect and serve, who needed to be feared.”

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Conventional morality is under siege from outside forces in Elizabeth Brooks’s THE WOMAN IN THE SABLE COAT (Tin House, 336 pp., paperback, $17.95), which follows the very different but intertwined lives of two British women during World War II. Nina is hopelessly young and hopelessly romantic. Kate is a decade older, bookish and reserved. What links them is Guy, once Kate’s childhood playmate and now a clearly mismatched — and devastatingly handsome — husband. These three first meet in a village in the northwest of England in 1934, but it’s not until 1942, when the entire country is under threat, that their personal certainties will crumble.

Brooks is particularly adept at evoking the tumultuous emotional atmosphere at the R.A.F. base where Nina works as a parachute packer and Guy serves as navigator for a bomber crew. How can Kate, safely back at home tending her sickly son, understand what it’s like to be in a place where “the veil between ****** and life is threadbare”? When Nina reconnects with Guy, she has already lost three suitors to the war and the fourth is on borrowed time. To her, R.A.F. Charlwood is an “accelerated universe,” a place where “wartime pleasures involve a measure of make-believe” and marriage vows can be casually broken. Yet she may come to regret her impassioned plea: “Why should I be principled, when the whole world has gone wrong?”

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#Novels #Power #Struggles #Era

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