Jason Goodwin, The Bellini Card (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
This is the third book in a mystery series featuring Investigator Yashim, who lives in Istanbul during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was still a force to reckon with in global politics, culture and trade. I've read and reviewed the two earlier novels in the series, The Janissary Tree and The Snake Stone. I was very pleased to discover that The Bellini Card was as enjoyable to read as The Janissary Tree. This gives me hope that Goodwin and his publisher have figured out how to make these work. Let's hope the buying public agrees with me!
I noted in my review of The Snake Stone that the old Sultan, Mahmut II, was dying. The Bellini Card takes place as his successor, Abdulmecid, is just coming into power. Abdulmecid makes an appearance in two scenes in the first few pages of the novel. He is young, pallid, unattractive, and seems to suffer from what the English Victorians would have called catarrh. In fact, as Goodwin says, he speaks in a voice "treacled with mucus."
Abdulmecid and his rather sleazy vizier Resid give Yashim conflicting orders with regard to a painting of Mehmet the Conquerer rendered by Gentile Bellini that is rumored to have surfaced in Venice after being out of circulation for roughly three hundred and fifty hundred years. (NOTE: A version of this painting currently hangs in the National Gallery in London.) The young Sultan wants Yashim to travel to Venice to find and purchase the painting; however, Resid warns Yashim to stay away from Venice. His message proves highly prophetic in terms of the later action of the novel.
In an effort to satisfy both orders, Yashim convinces his friend Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (a fancy name for the Sultan's court) to make the trip to Venice in his stead. Somewhat unconvincingly disguised as an American art dealer, Palewski arrives in Venice just as the local police are fishing a dead art dealer out of one of the canals. Before the novel ends, two more Venetian art dealers and one very talented Turkish calligrapher bite the dust.
Most of the action of The Bellini Card takes place in Venice, a city much diminished from its medieval glory. The physical decay which is an inevitability in a city built on a lagoon was already very much under way by 1840, and Goodwin does a very nice job of describing the associated sights, sounds and smells. But Venice had also lost her eminence as a trading center by this time, and to make matters worse had become an outpost of the far-flung Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus the rather sympathetic local police officer assigned to investigate the murders is often sidelined by the Austrian authorities who occupy the city and at least ostensibly run it.
While Yashim shows up in a number of important scenes, I would finger Palewski as the real star of The Bellini Card. For much of the novel, he's on his own in Venice, compelled to use his wits and his somewhat out of practice swordsmanship skills to survive. I always found him a likeable enough character, so I appreciated having an opportunity to see him in action.
Like the earlier novels in the series, The Bellini Card features several scenes in which Yashim is preparing a meal. These are as always lovingly detailed and quite mouth-watering. In this one he receives as a gift a four-inch cook's knife made of Damascus steel, which he has an opportunity to use as a weapon as well. And Yashim gets to demonstrate that, despite his status as a eunuch, he knows how to make love to a beautiful woman. For that matter, that old war horse Palewski gets to demonstrate his amorous side, as well.
The Bellini Card also features scenes in which our heroes each get an opportunity to fence with the mysterious and beautiful Countess d'Aspi d'Istria. These are likewise detailed, although the details would no doubt make more sense to someone familiar with fencing moves, which I am not.
Also like the earlier novels in the series, The Bellini Card is written in third person and is organized into very short chapters, some less than a page long. These chapter transitions often reflect actual scene changes. I imagine some readers might find this style a bit disquieting, rather like listening to a conversation in which the speaker(s) keep changing subjects without apparently completing any thought. (I actually know someone who talks like this, and it's quite aggravating!)
My only quibble with The Bellini Card is its lack of two simple illustrations that would have significantly enhanced my understanding of the action. One would be a line map of 1840s Venice with the locations of the various places mentioned in the narrative marked. I didn't really want to be totally disoriented as I followed Palewski and Yashim around the city, but I was.
The other would have been a line drawing of the Sand Reckoner's Diagram, a geometrical form that appears in several contexts throughout the book and indeed forms a key plot device. Goodwin's verbal descriptions of it are less than fully illustrative, and my efforts to find a depiction of it on the ‘net have been totally unsuccessful. What I did learn was that Archimedes wrote a treatise called the Sand Reckoner in which he attempted to determine the upper limit to the number of grains of sand that would fit into the universe. But there is no diagram associated with this effort, as far as I could ascertain.
It also appears that at one time there was a copy of the diagram on the blog for The Bellini Card. However, the design file was actually located on a Web page in Japan and it's no longer there, so that's not very helpful, either.
