Divergent Futures

e, Divergentfutures

an Gunn's erudite and poignant CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN notorious deportation centre of Fossoli, novel is set against the darkening in northern Italy, before being sent to his political landscape of interwar Dan Gunn assumeddeath in a Nazi concentration camp. Eurqpe. The narrator, Lucia, now in her eight- Lucia meanwhile falls for an English public ies, is prompted by a memorial service at the THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM schoolboy with pugilistic skills, Harry, only Albert Hall for the victims of the Arandora 256pp.Seagull Books. fl9.50. to find her dreams of happiness being Srar - the ship torpedoedand sunk off the Irish 978 0 85742 223 | shattered(and here, as in a few other placesin coastby a U-boat in July 1940, asit was trans- the novel, there are faints creaks of stereo- porting German and Italian internees to a descending into alcoholism. The second type)when shediscovers himinbed with Giu- camp in Canada, with the loss of more than brother, Giulio, eschewspolitics and opts to lio. 800 lives - to recount the story of her family become the creator of a luxurious ice-cream The novel takes its title from Wallace growing up as Italian immigrants in Edin- parlour. He is interned in June I94O, an Stevens'swell-known if elusivepoem, whose burgh during the interwar years.The narrative "enemy alien", and finishes onthe Arandora haunting refrain - "The only emperor is the moves deftly between Scotland and Italy, and Star aTongwith his younger brother Emilio, emperor of ice-cream" - strikes Lucia as a fit- in particular the family's native village of who struggles in vain in the oily Atlantic ting epitaph for her brother, and more gener- Maclodio: the site of a fifteenth-century battle waters to savehis sibling. Emilio survives the ally as an epigraph for her family's largely in northern Italy made famous by the great war to become a poet and academicat the Uni- tragic story. Irt an ageofviolent dictators,ide- Risorgimento poet and novelist Alessandro versityof Sussex- a nod of homage,perhaps, ological polarization and rampant imperial- Manzoni, in a verse drama that decried (appo- towards John Rosselli, the distinguished his- ism, the celebration of transient sensual sitely for the novel) the historic propensity of torian and son ofthe celebrated anti-Fascist, pleasure has a certain piquancy, and Gunn's Italians to internecine strife ("Brothers have Carlo Rosselli. novel brings vividly to life the huge price the massacredbrothers / This horrendous news I If the three brothers encapsulatein varying world paid for losing its humanitarian moor- bring"). ways three dominant strandsof Italian iiJent- ings. The book is firmly and for the most part The book traces the divergent fortunes of ity, Lucia's story has an equal measure of convincingly embedded in its period. There Lucia andherthree brothers.Dario, the eldest, metonymy. She spends the novel searching are, however, occasional anachronisms(Cin- becomesthe founder ofthe Edinburgh Fascist for love, and seemsto have found the answer ecittb, for instance,did not exist in the 1920s, club,'and spends the novel veering between in Rome in the high-minded'Valerio, to and there is a curious reference to "Prime unctuoussupport for Mussolini, sparring with whom she loses her virginity on a sumptuous Minister Chamberlain" in the same decade). a vicious local supporter of Oswald Mosley, bed'signalled for the use of the Fascist Party and the prominence given to anti-Semitism in fighting in Ethiopia (where he becomesa vic- Secretary, Achille Starace, during their Italian Fascismis odd, certainly for the period tim of his own side's deployment of mustard engagement function. But Valerio's Jewish before 1938.But theseminor historical sole- gas) and lying low in the war so as to avoid background impels himtowards anti-Fascism cisms do little to detract from what is a highly internment. He ends up as an opportunistic and to an eventual breachboth with Lucia and readable, well-paced and moving reflection supporter of the Allies and partisans, and a ,his own family. He is last heard of being on the fragility of identity and human decency would-be mayor of Maclodio, before rounded tp in 1944 and imprisoned in the in the face of emotive and partisan politics.

TLS APRIL 3 2015