Secrecy
February 2013
Rupert Thomson / Granta
Reading Secrecy is akin to taking a form of literary drug which then insinuates itself into the bloodstream, morphing into an amphetamine, aphrodisiac or inducer of nightmares and hallucinations.
Late 17th century Florence is rife with paranoia and moral persecution. Political astuteness and rapier wit are required to survive court intrigues. Zummo, a Sicilian outcast who creates lifelike wax sculptures, is privately commissioned by the Grand Duke, a Medici. The project is deeply shrouded in secrecy.
Whilst Patrick Süskind’s Perfume may have invented an olfactory vocabulary, Rupert Thomson’s tale is intensely chiaroscuro; its prose connected to the visual realm. A carriage is ‘a spindly, spidery thing’; ‘the flesh of the night sky peel[s] back to reveal the white bone of the moon’.
The author has accomplished with wax figures what Siri Hustvedt did for modern art in What I Loved; the process is luxuriated over whilst the very nature of art is interrogated. Steeped in a sinister atmosphere, populated by florid characters and overlaid with a romantic eroticism, Secrecy is wonderfully Baroque.
Secrecy is published by Granta on February 27.
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