Rating: 2/5
Review:
Disappointing
I'm afraid I was disappointed with The White Devil. It has won an award and some enthusiastic
reviews, but it wasn't for me.
This is a modern re-telling of the 1612 play The White Devil
by John Webster, set in 2005, largely in Rome. The narrator, "Vittoria",
is a married American woman with a very dubious past in which she and her
amoral brother may have been involved in murder and all sorts of other
things. She begins an affair with a
rich, powerful and corrupt Italian senator, from which gossip, intrigue and
death follow; if you are familiar with Webster's play, you'll have an idea of
how things play out.
I have to say that for me, the story isn't strong enough to bear
this reworking. It's a format which can
work very well; some of the current series of Hogarth Shakespeare reworkings –
like Shylock Is My Name and Dunbar, for example – have been brilliant, but they
have been in the hands of outstanding authors who are working with plays of
depth and insight into what it means to be human. With The White Devil, it seems to me that
neither the author nor the play fits those descriptions. The writing is decent enough and Stansberry
develops an oppressive atmosphere, but there's a curious emotional flatness to
the whole thing which may fit the narrator's character but makes for a rather
tedious, disjointed and unengaging narrative.
Also, something made me a little uneasy about this woman's voice written
by a male author. In principle there's
nothing wrong with that, but although this is not particularly sexually
explicit, the whole thing is steeped in sexuality and for me it's not quite
well enough written to be convincing and therefore to avoid being slightly
creepy.
Others seem to have found this very good, judging by some of
the quoted reviews, but I'm afraid I really can't recommend it.
(My thanks to the publisher, Orion, for an ARC via
NetGalley.)
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