The Anguish of Aftermath

Historical fiction is as much about the present as the past. This has become something of a truism now. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can be understood as a critique of McCarthy’s witch hunts, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke as an indictment of his country’s “neo-Vietnam,” the Iraq War. With The Plot Against America, Philip Roth plays it both ways: he lays bare America’s pre-war anti-Semitism in a narrative that also eviscerates George Bush Jr.’s presidency.

Given the times in which we live, it is hard therefore not to read Stephen Finucan’s fine debut novel, The Fallen—set during the Allied occupation of Naples, at the close of the Second World War—in the light of our own current occupation of Afghanistan. Not that the novel insists on such wooden comparisons—it is too elegant for that, too entangled in the particularities of its historical era to be so transparently displaced. And yet our rising death toll and grim reports from the front lines (in Afghanistan) cannot help but cast a shadow over the novel.

The Fallen opens in 1944, after British troops have occupied Naples. The Germans have fled. But as with the American “liberation” of Afghanistan (and Iraq), chaos and corruption abound. The black market thrives. Hunger and disease are everyday realities; only bitter luck separates the dead from the (barely) living, who subsist on bartered scraps and what can be killed in the streets. In the novel’s dramatic opening scene, a hungry man watches a donkey die in the road, saddened he cannot be the one to haul it off for food. Naples is a city of mass starvation, typhus, muck raking, looting and terrorizing by the local mafia, the Camorra.

Everyone must navigate this desperate mess in his or her own fashion. Aptly, then, The Fallen is told from multiple perspectives, giving the reader a view of the chaos at every level.

Augusto Parente is the head curator of the National Archaeological Museum, home to priceless historical artifacts. He is also a former high-ranking fascist, although political by necessity and not by conviction. His main mission has always been to protect the treasures in his possession, to guard them against the city’s thieves and its occupiers—German or American.

Parente’s assistant is a young woman named Luisa Gennaro. Scarred by the deaths of her parents and brother, she atones for her survival through a kind of physical asceticism that goes beyond deprivation (i.e., boyish clothes, short-cropped hair, etc.) and volunteers at the Ospedale del Santo Sepulcro, where her parents died.

Parente’s nephew, Aldo Cioffi, is a small-time crook invested only in his own survival, despite the support of his uncle and of his oldest friend, Lello. Left to flounder after the war, he struggles to navigate this brutal society through equally brutal means. When he gets involved with the most vicious wing of the Camorra, he sets in motion a sequence of events that will bring harsh consequences to all.

Enter Thomas Greaves. The aptly named Greaves is a young Canadian lieutenant reassigned to Naples after suffering a nervous breakdown. He had committed a fatal mistake on the front lines: in the fog of battle, he ordered an attack on a school-house, accidentally killing innocents. In Naples he is assigned the “easier” task of field security: to keep an eye on the old fascists still living in the city, and on the new gangs rising up in the vacuum of power. It is an unenviable task, impossible for an outsider in the closed world of Italian crime. But Greaves, bearing his guilt with him, sees each numbing day as a way to atone for his mistake.

Assigned to supervise Parente, Greaves soon realizes that the curator is harmless, that his fascism was a smokescreen to enable him to continue his museum work without interference. Greaves strikes up a friendship with the old man, and finds himself drawn to the contemptuous Luisa.

Finucan choreographs these relationships in a clean and meticulous way. The novel quickly gathers speed. Cioffi approaches Greaves and asks him to persuade Parente to give him a job taking inventory at the museum. Of course, Cioffi being Cioffi, his motives are far from pure. His real desire? To repay his debts by quietly stealing priceless objects for his mob boss to sell on the black market. But Greaves, being Greaves, wants to believe in Cioffi’s desire for redemption—just as he wants others to believe in his own.

If Cioffi’s pilfering goes unnoticed for a time, it is only because Parente has other, quicker fingers to worry about. The Americans insist on making an inventory of the museum and, as occupiers with no long-term claim to the objects, they prove less than responsible. This part of the novel conjures up images of the American invasion of Iraq, those haunting news broadcasts from 2003 that revealed the devastation of the Baghdad museums, hospitals and libraries. Although such wholesale destruction was, mercifully, avoided in Naples—a further criticism of the Middle East campaigns of our own day—Finucan depicts with a clear eye the great damage done by the Allied inventories. Parente wanders the galleries afterward to find that “the Americans had gone and left a mess behind them.” The sentence haunts with all its current-day implications.

In The Fallen, Finucan captures with impressive clarity the guilt that comes with survival. Especially excellent is his ability to conjure the essence of characters in a few brief strokes. Greaves’s features give the impression of being “worn away, so that he seemed a person who was less than he’d once been. He was clearly a man who suffered horrible dreams.” An American colonel sent to inventory the Archaeological Museum has “a small, womanly build, with the narrow wrists and soft fingers of an accountant … he was the sort of man who supposed that history could be understood by tallying numbers, as if it were no more than the sums on a spreadsheet.” These subtle portraits establish personalities with an exactitude it takes other writers whole pages to express.

The Fallen’s flaws emerge, oddly, from its strengths. At times the storytelling can feel too clean, as if we were reading a screenplay, not a novel. Researched details are left at times to float above the narrative, rather than being incorporated into the story itself—places, for example, are named with great precision but often lack description, as if the names themselves ought to convey the atmosphere. Sometimes, too, Finucan’s complex characterization is sacrificed for a certain cinematic crispness: whenever a character reads something, for example—it does not matter who or what—he or she will inevitably finger the paper ruminatively or lift it to the light. The dialogue especially bears the brunt of this simplification. Gangsters say such things as “Do not play with me, dottore. I do not like games,” “You think maybe you have made a deal with the devil, padre?” and “He’s not going to be a problem for anyone anymore.”

Missteps such as these stand out in a novel otherwise subtle, patient and stately in its revelations. It is hard to pull off stately in 226 pages, but Finucan does it, and the novel serves as a powerful reminder that the horrors of war do not end after the guns have been set down. Historical fiction may very much be about the present; and yet Finucan’s novel must be read, too, as a kind of stay against a too-dark future—a warning that we must not forget where we are now, when in time we are here again.