FICTION: Tracking Girogineby Thomas Kadebo, Brandonm 213pp, £12.99. PRESUMABLY because it is a work of literary fiction, Tracking Giorgionehas plenty of what critics sometimes call "peritextual" material: prefatory quotes before each chapter, and a "Pre Position" drawn from the notebooks of its narrator, Giorgio Barbatella.
Barbatella is an Anglo-Italian art historian drawn by personal history and aesthetic disposition into a (rather desultory and anything but urgent) pursuit of the lost paintings of Giorgione, a Venetian Renaissance painter.
In this “Pre Position” Barbatella sketches a phenomenological account of aesthetics: “the picture,” he says “itself is customised in the mind by the unification of dots”. And the novel, we might say, is customised in the mind by the unification of sentences. Sadly for author Thomas Kabdebo, his novel fails when judged by this rule of interpretation. Kabdebo himself has translated some 40 books, which makes his tone-deaf, almost violently ugly prose baffling. Solecisms and inconsistencies of style abound.
Among Kabdebo’s irksome habits is his endless iteration, in italics, of meals Barbatella eats, down to the brand names of coffee (Segafredo even appears in a glossary for some reason; but not Lavazza). Often it is impossible to say what is meant: “poured me coffee brewed in a test tube like in a retort”; elsewhere, metaphors fall flat: a fox drags his tail like a torch; but who carries a torch behind? A flock of swans lifts with a swish of wing that fills the air for a second; has he ever seen a swan take off? Endless, artless banalities clog up the narrative: “travelling in my Passat, with windows open as the car lacked air conditioning and it was warm outside” – this from the Alan Partridge school of narration.
Elsewhere, Kabdebo auditions for the Bad Sex in Literature award: “My body infused the valley between her long, girlish thighs . . . Sexual desire, like hunger, is regulated by a centre that stimulates sensitivity to dopamine and depresses sensitivity to seratonin. In the course of sexual excitement blood vessels expand, and this is brought about by the parasympathetic nerves. The clitoris swells and the little veins around the vagina expand, while the interior becomes more slippery . . . the clitoris stiffens and the vagina plays like a bow on a string on the male instrument that releases the sperm.” The ungainly mixture of registers does not confine itself to such passages; it is most rampant in the dialogue. Here is a mother: “Your dad’s dark wavy hair, my one-time bronze crown mellowed into your walnut-coloured hair. My delicate white skin, and your father’s sallow complexion, produced, in fusion, this ever-so-lightly hued off-white colour on your strong limbs.”
Some passages would not be out of place in Dan Brown, where, at least, the reader can begin to forgive them as exigencies of a book whose raison d'êtreis its narrative thrust. But Tracking Giorgioneis a self-consciously literary work, and it would be disingenuous not to judge it by the standards it seeks to attain.
This novel of ideas, then, raises precious few that are not banal, save for one: can a reader look beyond the prose he is stumbling over and see, as it were, the wood and not the trees? This reviewer would argue not, but even if this were possible, the over-riding sense in Tracking Giorgioneis of distraction from the book we should be reading. The novel extends over too many years, with the eponymous tracking subsiding for long passages devoted to the narrator's domestic life. This reads like memoir, but not the kind of compelling intellectual mystery one expects. Crucially, these episodes are just that: episodic, decadently so. They have no narrative function in themselves but merely interrupt the occasions on which the Giorgione quest takes another humble step forward: an invitation to a gallery, a book of hours revealed and so on.
Alan O’Riordan is a freelance journalist