Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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It's hard to explain what makes The Venetian's Wife such an enchanting book-enchanting in the most literal sense, casting a spell over the reader. Each time I reread it, it draws me deeper into its fantasy of supernatural spiritual connections between strangers and intrigue stretching across centuries.

The Venetian's Wife is the latest book from Nick Bantock, the creator of the remarkable TGriffin and Sabine. Like those earlier books, The Venetian's Wife is told almost entirely through diary entries, letters, and postcards. In this book, Bantock embraces the computer age and adds email to his arsenal. But underneath the technological trappings lies a timeless tale of love and passion.

The plot of The Venetian's Wife is straightforward enough. Sara Wolfe, a young art conservator, notices a sketch of the Hindu god Shiva in a gallery of the San Francisco museum where she works. She finds herself strangely drawn to the sketch, a stained and yellowing page torn from a notebook; soon afterwards, she receives a mysterious job offer from one N. Conti, the descendent of a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant who had journeyed throughout the East. On his travels to Persia, India, and China, he acquired a vast collection of Hindu sculpture; Sara's task is to reassemble the scattered sculptures.

No sooner has she begun, however, than she finds herself caught up in a web of intrigue involving the Vatican, the supernatural, and the Internet-a world where nothing is quite where it seems. Suspending her disbelief in the seemingly impossible events that envelop her, she learns to value experience, to trust her emotional instincts, and to love.

If Sara resists before succumbing to the fantastic situation in which she finds herself, the reader does not. Greeted by lush illustrations reminiscent of-but even richer than-the best picture books of childhood, welcomed by remarkable un-self-consciously poetic language, the reader suspends her disbelief as she would for the fairy tale the book's subtitle evokes: "A Strangely Sensual Tale of a Renaissance Explorer, a Computer, and a Metamorphosis."

Undoubtedly the rich illustrations of The Venetian's Wife add to the book's magic. The yellowed manuscript pages and luxuriant art-gallery catalogs play a crucial part in the narrative. Like Bantock's earlier works, this one uses collages of found objects-stamps, maps, crumbling letters written in the graceful script of earlier centuries-along with whimsical sketches and images that draw a second look, and a third, before they yield their full significance.

Bantock uses the same layered approach to tell his story, moving from letter to diary entry to email message without ever losing any of the many narrative threads woven into the rich fabric of his tale. Accounts of trans-Atlantic plane flights and strolls through San Francisco mingle easily with retellings of Hindu myths and fifteenth-century manuscripts. By concealing nuggets of information within both the text and the images-in more than one instance, narratives relating crucial background details masquerade as singed, handwritten notebook pages-Bantock draws the reader into an exploration of his richly textured world. His approach invites endless rereading; because he has tucked so many morsels into his work, they cannot all be savored, or even tasted, at once.

The non-linear nature of Bantock's narrative creates a space in which the most improbable plot twists seem plausible and the supernatural seems possible. Stopping for a moment to read a capsule summary of a Hindu myth or to ramble through an auction catalogue hardly detracts from the flow of the central narrative; on the contrary, as it yields up more of its hidden nuances, the book reveals itself to be a tightly woven web, whose every seemingly digressive strand proves integral to the creation of a fantastic, utterly believable tale. Perhaps this is the true source of the spell of The Venetian's Wife.

Drawing the reader down one apparently divergent path after another, Bantock invites the reader to discover subtlety after subtlety of the world he has created, until the reader has so fully immersed herself in its fantasy-and has taken such an active role in exploring it and teasing out its treasures one by one-that she cannot do other than believe in the world she has discovered.