The body on the mountain

Colin Greenland enjoys another case for Aurelio Zen in Michael Dibdin's Medusa
Medusa by Michael Dibdin

by Michael Dibdin
280pp, Faber, £16.99

The detective novel can be many things: intellectual conundrum, forensic experiment, philosophical disquisition. In Michael Dibdin's hands it has become a sort of travel writing, a guided tour of the local life, character and mores of the various regions of Italy. Recent investigative excursions have taken his itinerant policeman Aurelio Zen to Milan, Piedmont, Sicily, Lucca and even, through a strange semi-hallucinatory diversion, Iceland. Zen's latest outing begins in a disused tunnel deep beneath the Dolomites, where a group of Austrian cavers have inadvertently rappelled straight into an aged corpse.

When the deceased, identified as Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero, late of the Alpini regiment, and officially reported dead in a plane crash some 30 years earlier, is peremptorily and quite illegally whisked away from the morgue by military police officers, Zen takes an interest. Nominally part of a special unit set up by the ministry of the interior but in fact operating alone, he uncovers a trail that leads from the subterranean death chamber to Campione, a casino town and tax haven wholly owned by Italy yet located in Switzerland; from there to a derelict farm near Cremona; and on to Verona, a city he has never visited but has always, as a dutiful son of Venice, despised.

Perhaps it is only fair, then, if Verona appears unwelcoming. Its river seems particularly nasty. "A rain as serious and solid as hail was falling. Beyond the other side of the street, the vast bulk of the Adige glided past like the collective unconscious of the sleeping city, a viscous colloid the colour of old blood, laden with muck and garbage, amorphous forms and sodden hulks, shattered hopes and broken dreams."

That passage is a good sample of Dibdin, his method and some of his purposes. Opening with a concrete perception by an isolated individual, it immediately and assertively stretches outwards in all directions, piling up forceful figurative effects to a sweeping, almost abstract conclusion. The tone is disenchanted; jaundiced, even. Its pungency, its contentiousness, seem to reflect more upon the observer than the scene before him. There is also, as fans may recognise, a hint of mischief in the rhetoric. The hyperbole knows exactly how much too far it is going.

With chapters dedicated to the scattered survivors of a complex crime, solitaries whose thoughts, like the inspector's, spread unrestricted through narrative space, Dibdin's misanthropic wit finds plenty to play with. Adultery, racism, selfishness, bureaucracy, the military; all attract his fine-toothed brand of amused cynicism. Zen's principal devices for cutting through the foggy maze of institutional deviousness and corruption that is Berlusconi's Italy include the half-truth, the calculated misdirection and the outright lie. Rarely does he produce his warrant card except to flout its licence. Curious about a locked bookshop, he invents a pretext to borrow a hammer from the unsuspecting proprietor of a nearby cafe, smashes the shop window, then arrives, having returned the hammer, to take charge of the investigation. "I saw everything," he declares. "Pure chance."

"To be honest," a weary journalist confides some time later, "I don't think there's any chance that we'll ever find out what happened to Leonardo Ferrero, or whether there really was a rightwing military conspiracy to take over the country back in the 70s." This is the point at which the mystery writer must, however reluctantly, set other ambitions aside and finish the job. Genre fiction, detective fiction especially, requires - is predicated upon - closure. The fate of Ferrero may not be left unexplained; referred, like the bombing at Bologna railway station or the hanging of Roberto Calvi under Blackfriars Bridge, to the impenetrable, enduring misteri d'Italia.

The sweet, neat thing about Medusa, unlike some of the more playful entries in the Zen catalogue, is that the solution is there from the very beginning, in the relationships between the characters. Only history obscures their geometry. Despite our access to their viewpoints and memories, it only gradually becomes clear. They hold secrets from each other, deceits and misunderstandings thickened by age and separation, while time and death hold secrets from them all. Perhaps, too, Dibdin's habitual complicated time-scheme - opening each scene in the middle, then routing us backwards and forwards through nested reminiscences and digressions - disguises a degree of over-determination to the plot. The more you think about it, the less plausible it all seems. Only in Italy, the book seems to declare - or perhaps, only in detective fiction.

· Colin Greenland's latest novel, Finding Helen, is published by Transworld.

Today's best video

Today in pictures