After Hannibal

Barry Unsworth

Strade vicinali, they're called. The small unmade roads you find in rural parts of Italy which give access to a few houses and then peter out a few hundred metres after the last house. It's on one of these roads, near Perugia in Umbria, that Barry Unsworth builds his novel. The road's residents are a mysterious solitary German, a gay Italian couple, an unhappy English one, an American couple whose house is almost as unmade as the road itself (they're in the middle of a failing restoration project) and an Italian professor. All of them are transplants and second homers, of course, but while most of them come to various sorts of grief, this isn't one of those books in which the native triumphs over the invader. Almost the ghastliest family of them all is the Checchetti family (and Unsworth spells it that way throughout so it can't be a mistake but it seems to me Cecchetti is the likelier Italian spelling - perhaps both surnames exist), born and bred Umbrians who, to a certain extent, control the entrance to the road.

No, Unsworth specialises in three dimensional characters. No one in the book is either wholly likeable or dislikeable. Even the crook who is swindling the American couple out of their funds while pretending to supervise their building work is, in a very small way, redeemed by an endearing habit of dressing up in mediaeval costume before chasing his wife round the bedroom prior to vigorous sex.

But that makes it sound like it might be a comedy, which it isn't. The lone German nurses a dark secret dating back to the war (rather predictably, I thought) and most of the other couples are linked together in unhappy litigation. It's still intriguing though and there's just the right amount of local colour and history (from the ancient history of the title through to modern history and all of it bloody) spooned on top of a plot which works and characters you care about.