There's life after Lady Chablis

The new novel from John Berendt – the man who brought Savannah, Georgia to readers all over the world in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – is set in Venice and based on the mysterious fire that erupted inside the grand old Venetian opera house in 1996

Venice, so far, has survived almost everything: wars, earthquakes, plagues, fires, literary pretentiousness and the sexual depredations of Lord Byron and Giovanni Giacomo Casanova. It has been occupied or besieged by the Lombards, the Austrians, the Nazis and Napoleon. It has – most famously of all – resisted for more than a thousand years the waters of the Adriatic Sea, gnawing away at its very foundations. But now, La Serenissima faces a challenge that may prove more indomitable than all of these: John Berendt has written a book about it. Lest you doubt this dire prophecy, go ask around in Savannah, Georgia. In 1994, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the author's first book, was issued with a small initial print run and little advance publicity. It went on to sell more than two and a half million copies in hardcover and spent more than four years on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, a record that still stands. And although Savannahians welcomed the windfall of tourist dollars, the city's drowsy charm would never again be the same. Midnight became known as the book that launched a thousand air-conditioned tour buses, not to mention the career of a previously unknown transvestite performer named Lady Chablis, who became the toast of the Elderhostel circuit. Even the "Bird Girl" statue from the book's famous cover had to be moved to protect it from the adoring throngs. The oddest thing about Midnight, indeed, was the vast middlebrow appeal of its subject matter: for a time, it seemed as if your parents and all their friends were sitting on the beach reading a book about a gay antiques dealer and his murdered lover, a black drag queen and a voodoo priestess. The phenomenon seems, in retrospect, to have captured something of the tame-bohemian spirit of the 1990s, the decade of RuPaul, Rent and Gus Van Sant. Midnight gave its readers a titillating glimpse of the netherworld, albeit from a safe remove. The City of Falling Angels – one of the longest-awaited literary encores in recent times – strikes many of the same notes as Midnight. It, too, is set in one of history's blessed backwaters, a place of crumbling mansions and rococo intrigue. And it, too, teems with a diverse cast of aristocrats and lowlifes. On the night of 29 January 1996, a mysterious fire erupted inside the grand old Venetian opera house of La Fenice. Within a few hours, its gilt-encrusted boxes, frescoed salons and legendary stage – where Verdi's La Traviata and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress had their premieres – were reduced to charred ruins. Three days later, by coincidence, Berendt arrived in Venice. (In this book, unlike in Midnight, the author does not tinker with chronology to make it appear that he arrived in time to witness its central episode. Perhaps stung by criticism of the liberties taken last time, he has included an author's note attesting that his account is pure nonfiction.) According to various published accounts, Berendt had struggled to find a subject for his second book. At one point, he told The Washington Post, he explored writing about two escapees from a 1940s leper colony, only to be foiled when one of the lepers died before he could be interviewed. But the burning of La Fenice offered all the ingredients of a tale to rival the murder of the hustler Danny Hansford – especially when a colorful local prosecutor opened a high-profile arson investigation. Much as he had done in Savannah, Berendt set up shop in Venice, renting first an apartment in a 17th century palazzo and later a cottage that had belonged to Ezra Pound's mistress. Early in the book, Berendt acknowledges Henry James's caveat on the difficulty of writing about Venice: "There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject". (Four years after making this statement, of course, James sat down to write The Aspern Papers.) Yet Berendt's interest, he says, "was not Venice per se but people who live in Venice, which is not the same thing". And Venetians are a choice subject for literary non-fiction: in the city of canals, simply existing from day to day requires a kind of improvisational finesse, not to say willful eccentricity, far beyond even the standard for the rest of Italy. In an age when great eccentrics are in ever shorter supply, perhaps this explains why the population of Venice has been steadily dropping, from 174,000 five decades ago to some 70,000 at the time of the Fenice fire. Among those remaining, Berendt finds more than enough characters: Ludovico De Luigi, a surrealist artist and provocateur; Archimede Seguso, a brilliant and taciturn glass blower; Ralph Curtis, the Mars-obsessed heir to a grand Renaissance palazzo; and a ceaseless parade of dotty contessas and marchesas. Amid this swirl of carnivalesque plumage, Berendt himself remains a drab, almost faceless character, inscrutably bland and accommodating. This is nothing new. Midnight often felt like a Marx Brothers romp as narrated by Zeppo, and this was actually a key to the book's success. When Berendt squired Lady Chablis to an African-American debutante ball, the comedy worked because he came off as the ultimate straight man. If Savannah seemed to woo Berendt, however – to stroke his hair and coo honeyed nothings in his ear – Venice, perhaps inevitably, seems to eye him with politely contained suspicion. Instead of the cleverly interconnected set pieces of Midnight, there is a procession of characters, each dutifully presented before discreetly taking his or her leave. ("'Now, Alvise Loredan is someone you must meet!' Peter said as he introduced me. 'Count Loredan is a quintessential Venetian and a member of one of the oldest patrician families.'") Where Midnight brimmed over with personally observed details, The City of Falling Angels bogs down in minutiae, often involving subplots that occur largely offstage. One overly long chapter chronicles the infighting among the self-absorbed board members of the group Save Venice, delving into intricacies of seating arrangements and office rent payments that even the antagonists themselves might find tedious. As for the opera house arson plotline, it can best be characterised with an Italian word that has no exact counterpart in English: vicenda. A vicenda is a story that combines elements of mystery, scandal and intrigue; it is often used by the Italian press in describing Mafia plots or political corruption cases. Unfortunately, by its very nature, it also lacks any conventional climax or resolution, petering out in a flurry of speculation, dropped charges and contradictory accusations. Moreover, in the nearly ten years that have passed since the fire at La Fenice (which reopened, after intensive restoration, in 2003), the world has witnessed other and more dramatic episodes of urban devastation. The burning of a theatre and slow sinking of a city seem far less dire after the travails of New York and New Orleans. In this grimmer time, arty bohemianism may no longer fascinate the book-buying masses, such as they are. Berendt's voice is gentle and tolerant, reveling in human complexities; he has no pretensions of offering anything more than a good story. The recent breakout bestsellers – I am thinking especially of a certain other book that links Renaissance Italy and the present – are quite the opposite, humourlessly promising shortcuts to mystical truths. If it seems unlikely that Berendt's new book will rival the success of his last one, a more interesting question might be whether Midnight, had it been published today, would have won the vast readership it did 11 years ago. Even if I'm completely wrong, and The City of Falling Angels is still on the bestseller list in 2009, perhaps Venice can be cautiously optimistic about its eventual fate. After all, The Savannah Morning News reported a few months ago that, finally, Midnight has been fading from the public consciousness. "Sure, about once a month the Lady Chablis still packs Club One with straight middle-aged tourists... But many visitors and new residents have had no encounter with the book at all." And one of the great things about having canals is that it makes a city utterly impervious to tour buses. The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt, Penguin Press, €20 © 2005 The New York Times