From Shipwreck to Lifeboat

The ocean has many neighborhoods, from shoreline to high sea.  Since June I’ve been reflecting here weekly on ocean novels, fictional tales of stormy seas, Gulf bayous, tidal rivers, and this week, Adriatic lagoons.  All salty and mysterious.

Cenzo, fishing in the dark Venice Lagoon in 1945, finds the lifeless body of a girl, hence the book’s title The Girl from Venice.  He hides it under a tarp on his small boat and plans to leave it at a Venice church on his way to the fish market, to stay out of trouble.  When the occupying Gestapo stop and search his boat, the body has disappeared.  Cenzo retreats back into a lagoon channel hideouts only he knows, to repair his boat they have trashed, and the girl suddenly reappears in the water boatside, now very alive. 

Turns out the mystery girl, a good swimmer and hider, is Giulia, from a wealthy Venetian Jewish family that had been hiding for some years from Nazis and Italian fascists, but the group had that night been betrayed.  Only she escaped.  Sailing now back to his village, the boat is sucked by currents to an island held by the Gestapo.  Together Cenzo and Giulia kill an SS officer with their own hands.  He takes her back to his fishing shack and hides her from the authorities and from his own snoopy mother and his brother’s hapless widow whom he is expected to marry but doesn’t want to, and more snoopy and possibly collaborator neighbors. 

This is all in the first night, the first 20 pages.

Later they together pursue and reveal the betrayer of her family and friends and cleverly drown him with a fishing net.  Cenzo figures out a family secret and a way to avoid marrying his brother’s widow.    His other brother, the film star and probable collaborator, Giorgio – is he trying to save or betray our hero and heroine?  When the war finally ends, they are all at Mussolini’s mountain hideout.   Mid huge explosions and betrayals and a pathetic attempt by Il Duce to escape with gold bars that weigh down the plane, our heroes hijack the plane to freedom.  They fly back to Venice.  (No! Go to Lisbon, get papers, fly to freedom with Ilsa and Victor!)   As the sun sets over the lagoon, we wonder, will Giulia, now without family or passport, stay with Cenzo the fisherman on the lagoon or pursue the more cultured worldly life she was raised in?

I was at the airport when I bought this book by Martin Cruz Smith, who wrote Gorky Park and 8 more detective thrillers featuring Russian Arkady Renko, and is now 75.  It was good travel reading, short chapters, wartime drama, family secrets, possible romance, Venice.  It seems well researched, lots of detail about the Lido and the Lagoon, many different Mediterranean fish and fishing methods.  As readers of my reports on 10 or so previous ocean novels know, I was particularly happy to find a map in the beginning of the book - Cenzo’s fishing village Pellestrina is ten miles south of Piazza San Marco. 

I continue to be entranced and surprised by the many different roles that salty water plays in fiction.  I should read more Mediterranean ones. So different from Atlantic and Pacific.  I have pondered rereading The Odyssey.  But for this week, a mysterious lagoon and dangerous wartime suffice to deepen our sail through ocean literature.

I’ve been to Venice and read various Venice fiction.  Visiting or reading, a constant theme is death; the beloved city built right on the water and pierced by canals will be damaged or destroy by the sea tomorrow if not today.  It’s a wet maze of confused streets and hidden alleyways where one is always lost.   Death in Venice, City of Falling Angels, Donna Leon murder mysteries, Brideshead Revisited, Othello – lots of cold and moldy death.

Cenzo and Giulia are natives, and they never seem lost even in the most dangerous situations.  Cenzo knows the lagoon like the back of his hand, and even privileged Giulia swims like a fish and quickly learns the many ways to catch them.  But the lagoon is like the city, protected from the wider sea only by a narrow sand bar shoal which shelters fancy hotels and homes on the Lido and ramshackle huts in the fishing village, both right on the edge.  It’s an edgy place where threats from the outside world, whether storm or Gestapo, are just over the horizon. 

By definition a lagoon is an “elongated shallow body of water separated from a larger body of water by a shallow exposed shoal, reef or similar feature.”  Lagoons form on smooth level coasts, not steep rocky ones, and are vulnerable to tides, rising sea levels, erosion.  As such they are “young and dynamic.”  Our hero and heroine are also young and dynamic, likewise living on an edge that is threatened by a dangerous and unpredictable outside world of sea and violence.  Through their deep (actually shallow) knowledge of the lagoon, they survive.  They know water’s unpredictability, coastal hiding places, many different ways to trap and net and kill both fish and people, as well as various fishing lore, like “Big fish eat little fish”- all of which comes in handy.

This previous paragraph indulges in many of the same ocean and fishing metaphors that Smith does, which means the book can be a bit of a slog to get through with all this very obvious imagery (like a muddy lagoon – ok, enough metaphors.)   Some reviewers panned the book as a predictable indulgence of an aging author.

I found the metaphors and story intriguing and refreshing, and I was pretty sure the main characters were going to make it.  I liked the boat metaphors; Cenzo says his early troubled wartime life, dishonorably discharged after refusing to spray poison gas on Ethiopians in the North African campaign, was a “shipwreck.”  But by the last page he seems ready to move onto a new life with Giulia, and he calls his beloved boat a “lifeboat that has served its purpose.”

But the most vivid role the lagoon plays is as a place to hide, literally a lifesaver in wartime. Giulia hides there from the start and others survive the long occupation only through their hiding and dissembling skills.  As fishers and trappers of other creatures, they know how to avoid being caught themselves. 

Unlike all the various invaders and complicit Italians, our two young and dynamic ones rarely lie when questioned, maintaining their sense of integrity, but often withholding and hiding the whole truth.  Which (just one more metaphor!) reminded me of the lagoon; it is truly itself, not a rocky coast or deep sea, and it is very good at hiding and surviving – it looks bare but it is full of enough fish to live on forever.  Wherever they end up, I’m pretty sure both will survive and thrive.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter