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The Volcano Lover, 1992
Sontag's reputation is that of an intellectual whose formidable essays and critical studies rake lucidly through the phenomena of what is called "postmodern culture," taking in everything from photography to pornography, AIDS and "camp." Although not her first novel, The Volcano Lover is the first in a number of years and also the first Sontag fiction to come this reader's way. Its subject is a reimagination of the scandalous triangle formed by Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and her lover Admiral Horatio Nelson. The volcano rumbling in the background, and often in the foreground too, is Vesuvius.
As might be expected, this is prose of exceptional precision and polish, made to obey the author's bidding every step of the way. There are numerous passages, especially those describing the state of the volcano, that are simply a joy to read, so varied and vivid is the descriptive language. One easily gets deep into the book before nagging doubts about its real quality begin to set in. The Volcano Lover is, in fact, a most uneven work of fiction, alternating brilliant insight and imagination with intrusive, arid intellectual scrutiny, and wilfully disturbing the narrative with extraneous and pretentious material such as the first two pages of the prologue (where the author browses in a modern flea market) and the concluding chapters of tardy beyond-the-grave "testimony" from peripheral characters whose viewpoint, when pertinent, could just as easily and far more economically be accomodated while they are still alive and on stage. One can be either irritated or amused by the gratuitous insertion in the cast of characters of figures like Tosca and Baron Scarpia and even Goethe in a small cameo role.
Sontag is obviously more interested in analyzing her fictionalized interpretation of the notorious Lady Hamilton-Viscount Nelson liaison than in telling its story, and she is supremely conscious of the summary verdict of history on the protagonists. Nevertheless, her envisionment of the tale is thought-provoking and original, although she never does fully account for the attraction between the lovers and her fascination with the background revolution in Naples against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies often threatens to shift the reader's attention far from the famous romance.
Emma is introduced as a charming but common young woman with a disreputable past not far behind her. Originally the mistress of Hamlton's nephew, she is gotten rid of and passed on to the elderly widowed uncle, who soon raises her to his own class by making her his second wife. She exuberantly blossoms into the toast of Neapolitan society and relishes the role of intimate friend and confidante to Queen Maria Carolina. But as the years pass she becomes grossly overweight and histrionic, unaware that she has long outworn her social welcome.
Nelson is maliciously dubbed The Hero, and the portrayal is savage. A sickly and vainglorious little man, he wallows in the extravagant adulation which the Hamiltons heap upon him in celebration of his valorous deeds (and it is hard to see how the unheroic creature Sontag proposes could possibly have achieved them). He disobeys and ignores his naval superiors, commandeering a ship of the battle-line for his private purposes. Recklessly initiating British foreign policy, he allows Emma, with her sloppily sentimental sympathy for the Queen, to involve him in the royalist cause and brutally suppresses the fledgeling Neapolitan republic. But the glory of Trafalgar still lies ahead and at last Duty to King and Country pries him from Emma's cloying embraces. Having come to loathe the Hero, the reader cheers as he vacates these pages and vanishes to his apotheosis.
The true protagonist of Sontag's novel is the Cavaliere (the Chevalier), Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to the court at Naples. An aristocrat loftily accustomed to living beyond his means, and a cultured dilettant, the Cavaliere recoups his fortunes from time to time by selling off his latest collection of objets d'art, only to begin immediately amassing another for renewed aesthetic pleasure and future profit. Sontag dissects the nature of compulsive "collecting" and the soul of a Collector with her sharpest scalpels, overlooking no conceivable aspect of the subject.
Among the Cavaliere's many collectibles is the volcano itself. He is the "Volcano Lover" of the title and the novel is illustrated with drawings from Hamilton's Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies (1776, 1779). The Cavaliere happily spends the better part of his lifetime studying Vesuvius' moods and making hazardous journeys to the lip of the smoking crater, a passion that is not shared by his first wife, Catherine, who is otherwise well-suited to him in temperament. He becomes the local expert on Vesuvius and every prominent visitor's favourite guide to the site, and it is with a daunting array of volcano lore under his belt that, late in life, he takes on the task of converting the enchanting and vulgar young Emma into a lady.
Sontag is anxious to rescue the neglected figure of Sir William Hamilton from history's short memory and from his cursory casting as the cuckolded husband in the case, so often ignored and forever overshadowed by the blaze of Viscount Nelson's fame. A complacent cuckold he is in this reconstruction, but the central place he occupies throughout the novel and the care taken in imagining his character impose the Cavaliere indelibly on the reader's mind. "I have had a happy life," he muses on his deathbed. "I would like to be remembered for the volcano." Sontag does the utmost to ensure that he will be.
© Wordreign, July 1999
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