Once, when Ely had locked himself in his study to meditate and chant, I pressed my ear to the door to listen to what he was chanting. At first all I heard was a low rhythmic hum and then, when I realized when there were actual words beneath the hum, I couldn't recognize their language. I thought for a moment that he'd added speaking in tongues to his repertoire of miracles, but as I listened I realized he was chanting three repeated lines of Greek hexameter verse. It took me another hour to transcribe and translate the three lines. I don't know what I was expecting. A summoning of Satan? A prayer for help? An invocation to the dead. Certainly not these three questions:
Where did I go wrong today?
What did I accomplish?
What obligation did I not perform?
-The Night Villa
I've read several books by Carol Goodman, though The Night Villa is the first I've read since beginning this blog. Her books, which I've usually enjoyed, tend to have similar elements: a connection to the past, an exploration of mother/daughter relationships, a strong elemental presence (usually fire or water), a main character who is a scholar or an artist, a super-dramatic denouement. With The Night Villa, Goodman continues to stick closely to these familiar ideas. I didn't find it to be her most successful outing, but it still had its moments.
The Night Villa tells the story of Sophie Chase, a UT Classics professor who is recruited to join an excavation at Herculaneum after an unexpected tragedy almost derails the project. Sophie is hoping to learn more about 1st century slave Iusta, the subject of her thesis, who once lived in the villa that was buried by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius. Scrolls have been discovered at the site that promise to shed new light on Iusta's life, and, despite some misgivings, Sophie can't resist their siren call. Why misgivings? The project seems troubled from the start, but she's more concerned with the man she'll be working with: her former professor and former paramour (always a winning combination), Elgin* Lawrence.
If Lawrence's presence weren't enough to make the situation difficult, Sophie discovers that the project has a connection to the Tetratkys cult, which is devoted to the worship of Pythagorean principles. Her own ex-boyfriend left her to live with the cult a few years back, and when she starts to receive mysterious coded messages in Italy, she wonders if Ely could be behind them. Things are even further complicated when Lawrence confides that one of the members of the team--which also includes Sophie's student, the fragile Agnes; artist Simon; Christian scholar Maria; tech-wizard George; and the excavation's financial backer, John Lyros--is a member of the Tetraktys cult.
I actually liked the plot of the book well enough, and the characters, too. My problem with the book was largely one of exposition. There is a lot of information that Goodman wants to convey, mostly about mythology and history, to her readers. The issue is that in order to do so, she sometimes makes her characters, who are well versed in these subjects, talk in a manner that I found clunky and unrealistic. Example:
"Well," Agnes says, taking a deep gulp of air and refastening her ponytail, "for one thing, the newly excavated frescoes haven't been photographed yet, but, most important, they've also found charred papyrus rolls in the villa. The little taggie things on them--"
"Sillyboi," I suggest, providing the Greek term for the tags that ancient librarians used to identify papyrus rolls.
"Um, yeah." She giggles nervously. "I guess I should use the Greek term, but it always makes me laugh..."
I don't know about you, but that whole passage could have replaced with a dictionary definition of sillyboi and it would have been about as subtle. Either use the word or don't, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with sending your reader to a dictionary or Google, as long as we're not having to put the book down every other line. I think if Goodman had trusted the reader a little more, she wouldn't have had to be so long-winded and unnatural with the exposition in general.
Similarly, the supposed passages from the ancient texts they uncover at the site strike me as unusually candid--and again, exposition-heavy. But since Goodman has studied classics and I have not, I will assume she has a better ear for this sort of thing than I do, and maybe that is how people wrote at the time. She does make one reference to how remarkably open the author seemed in his writing, which does help to make the passages seem somewhat less glaringly modern. After a while, I got over how unlikely these passages seemed, and tried to just focus on the story, which made the book more enjoyable.
In short, not my favorite of her books, but I've read enough that I would still be interested in looking into her next one. (Just checked Amazon and discovered I'm actually one behind; Arcadia Falls comes out in paperback February 8th and sounds quite promising. )
Up next: More Tales of the City
*You'd think I might be tempted to go off on names again, but I was actually rather charmed when the back story for Elgin's name was revealed. Also I was terribly pleased that there was a minor character named Sam Tyler, a name shared by the main character on Life on Mars.
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