FARCE AND FURY - REMEMBERING CAMILLERI

Tech­ni­cal and po­lit­i­cal syn­the­sis

The jury for the Car­valho Prize pin­pointed the qual­i­ties of the two nov­el­ists and their de­tec­tives:

An­drea Camil­leri is today a gen­uine rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Mediter­ranean crime novel. Mon­tal­bano and Car­valho are char­ac­ters full of vi­tal­ity, temp­ta­tions and con­tra­dic­tions, who pre­fer the street to the of­fice, look­ing and speak­ing to ad­vances in com­puter tech­nol­ogy. Yet both are stub­born and per­sis­tent in the search for jus­tice, over and above the de­tails of the law. The two need to know the truth and make us part of this strug­gle to cre­ate a world where the pow­er­ful are not above the law.

Though a po­lice­man, Mon­tal­bano is an out­sider, al­ways pre­pared to risk his job to achieve jus­tice. Un­like the tor­mented North­ern cops such as Ian Rankin’s Rebus or Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole, Mon­tal­bano is not a lonely, di­vorced al­co­holic, tot­ter­ing on the precipice of self-de­struc­tion, dri­ven by his inner demons and the pres­sures of seek­ing jus­tice in an un­just so­ci­ety. Rather, he goes swim­ming in­stead of drink­ing. He plots comic re­venge on his tor­men­tors rather than turn­ing an­guish in­wards. And he sits on a tiled ter­race in the sun with a glass of wine and sea-food de­lights, rather than booze in filthy pubs and eat junk food. He han­dles the an­guish, the pres­sure, bet­ter by turn­ing it back on those in power, the real crooks.

Rage

There is a lot of farce in Camil­leri’s books. The en­dear­ing, in­com­pe­tent Catarella is a con­stant source of plea­sure. An ex­am­ple of Camil­leri’s wild hu­mour: in The Scent of the Night, Mon­tal­bano stops his car for a rest at a favourite spot and is out­raged to find that the new owner of the neigh­bour­ing bun­ga­low has chopped down the olive tree whose shade he loved to sit under. In a fit of rage at the van­dal against Na­ture, he smashes the var­i­ous vul­gar stat­ues and the win­dows of the bun­ga­low with a sledge­ham­mer and sprays ’ar­se­hole’ on all four walls with green paint. Un­der­stand­ably, first thing next morn­ing, the en­raged owner is down at the po­lice sta­tion. In­spec­tor Mon­tal­bano has to keep a straight face and sym­pa­thise with the vic­tim of such ap­palling van­dal­ism. Later, his col­league Fazio of­fers to buy him a new shirt. What? Why? says Mon­tal­bano. “Be­cause one of your cuffs is stained with... green paint.”

Round­ing the Mark is a good ex­am­ple of the po­lit­i­cal ex­plic­it­ness of the 27 Mon­tal­bano nov­els. Camil­leri places the story at a very spe­cific time: the re­turn of Berlus­coni to power. It is July 2001 and the ri­ot­ing po­lice have just killed Carlo Giu­liani dur­ing the anti-G8 demon­stra­tions in Genoa. The po­lice also planted ev­i­dence to jus­tify their in­fa­mous raid on the school where demon­stra­tors were sleep­ing. It is one of the key mo­ments of the anti-glob­al­i­sa­tion move­ment, when Berlus­coni’s gov­ern­ment, sup­ported by the rest of the G8, took de­lib­er­ate steps to in­tim­i­date all op­po­si­tion.

After hear­ing this news, Mon­tal­bano had sat there in his arm­chair for a good half-hour, un­able to think, shak­ing with rage and shame, drenched in sweat… his Ge­noese col­leagues had com­mit­ted an il­le­gal ac­tion on the sly, a coldly cal­cu­lated vendetta, fab­ri­cat­ing ev­i­dence into the bar­gain, the sort of thing that brought to mind long-buried episodes of the Fas­cist po­lice…

Mon­tal­bano feels ashamed to be a po­lice­man rep­re­sent­ing this abuse of power. Camil­leri’s laugh­ter and light­ness of touch mean he can land some pow­er­ful po­lit­i­cal punches.

Mon­tal­bano is watch­ing TV in the pre­ced­ing quote and tele­vi­sion plays a greater part in Camil­leri’s nov­els than in most crime books. Mon­tal­bano uses a sym­pa­thetic con­tact on one chan­nel to com­bat the pruri­ent lies of the right-wing chan­nel. In Round­ing the Mark, a pas­sion­ate de­fence of the right to mi­grate, to move freely, this lat­ter chan­nel raves against “the un­con­trol­lable hordes of des­per­ate, law­less peo­ple who daily land on our shores”. Camil­leri is seek­ing to ed­u­cate his read­ers to be crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment-con­trolled media. The enor­mous farce of Berlus­coni is real and dan­ger­ous.

Forc­ing his­tory’s hinges back on them­selves

An­guish stalks farce in the novel, Round­ing the Mark. Mon­tal­bano makes the mis­take of re­turn­ing a child to his ’mother’: the woman is not ac­tu­ally his mother and the child is later mur­dered. Mon­tal­bano’s friend the jour­nal­ist asks him why he’s so upset about a miss­ing boy. Salvo replies that when his fa­ther em­i­grated to go and work in Stuttgart, he en­coun­tered no­tices that pro­claimed: “Dogs and Si­cil­ians pro­hib­ited”. Salvo un­der­stands that the African mi­grants land­ing in Sicily are just like his fa­ther in Ger­many a gen­er­a­tion ear­lier. It is the chil­dren, in par­tic­u­lar, the hun­dreds of par­ent­less chil­dren who ar­rive that Mon­tal­bano feels for. The jour­nal­ist ex­plains to him that these lost chil­dren have “great com­mer­cial value.” The lucky ones are sold into adop­tion or for beg­ging. The less lucky are sold to pae­dophiles or for the use of their or­gans.

Camil­leri tells a story of a church Mon­tal­bano had en­coun­tered many years be­fore, whose door hinges were twisted back. A local man told Salvo why: the Nazis had locked every­one in­side the church and began to throw grenades in through the win­dows. “The peo­ple in­side, in their des­per­a­tion, had forced the door to open in the op­po­site di­rec­tion, and many had man­aged to es­cape”. Now, Mon­tal­bano re­flects, “those peo­ple flood­ing in from all the poor­est, most dev­as­tated parts of the world were strong enough and des­per­ate enough to turn his­tory’s hinges back on them­selves.”

The col­lec­tive strength of mi­grants is ca­pa­ble of de­feat­ing racist gov­ern­ment laws and po­lice con­trol. Camil­leri’s op­ti­mism of the spirit be­lieved that mass move­ments from below can de­feat the cap­i­tal­ist pow­ers.

Mon­tal­bano, the key to suc­cess

Few peo­ple knew much about Camil­leri until his first In­spec­tor Mon­tal­bano book, The Shape of Water, was pub­lished in 1994. The book wasn’t his first novel, but sev­eral he’d pub­lished be­fore had only achieved mod­er­ate suc­cess. How­ever, by the time of his death he had gone on to write 27 Mon­tal­bano nov­els, ris­ing at 6am every day, and some 100 books in all. In 1999, he had five books oc­cu­py­ing the first five places on the list of best-sell­ing books in Italy. Even­tu­ally, in his old age he be­came a house­hold name, and Italy’s most pop­u­lar writer.