Dark is the Morning by Rupert Thomson: An evocative tale of rural Italy

Rupert Thomson’s one of those authors who delivers well turned out, interesting fiction with little brouhaha. His work ranges widely from the early days of Soft!, a satire on the advertising world, to Secrecy, set in the Medici court of seventeenth-century Florence. Dark is the Morning takes us to a small town in Abruzzo where a young man’s happiness unravels spectacularly.

The steep wooded gully opened out into a scoop-shaped valley that was soaked in sunlight, the distant fields and meadows a radiant, exaggerated yellow green. Mountains rose beyond, their slopes sprinkled here and there with the white and grey of villages.

Gino and Franca met when they were nine, Franca informing Gino that she will marry him. Neither of them is particularly popular nor prepossessing. Gino constantly feels he falls short of the approval of his father, beloved by the village for his legendary foiling of a fascist plot back in Rome, years ago. Still living with his parents in his mid-twenties, Gino’s finally put the partying days that landed him in rehab behind him, seeking out Franca after his father reminds him of her childhood proposal. Their reunion swiftly turns into love, then marriage and a pregnancy that takes Gino by surprise. They’re happy, renovating the house Franca’s cousin has given them and relishing rural isolation. When Franca gives birth to their son, his serene beauty becomes so talked about, strangers seek out their home. Before long Gino’s torturing himself with Franca’s confession of her affair with an older man before their relationship began, delusions that even the British man he thinks of as his second father seems unable to diffuse.

In hindsight, it seemed like a lull, like the warm air that moves in ahead of a weather front, something blissful and mysterious, and not entirely to be trusted, not wholly real.  

Thomson bookends Gino’s narrative with Harry’s whose visit to a burnt-out house sets us up nicely for drama and a degree of suspense in the brief opening passage. Gino unfolds his own story, early hints suggesting a self-sabotaging jealousy that will destroy the unexpected happiness he and Franca enjoy. The suspense is handled well, foreshadowing adding to the tension, but what sets this novel apart is Thomson’s summoning up of small-town Italian family life together with his evocation of landscape and legend. Beautiful descriptions of rural Italy are woven through Gino’s account, contrasting with his own increasingly unhinged behaviour. While Harry’s introductory observations worked well, the final passage was a tad too long for me; a small criticism of what is otherwise an absorbing, atmospheric novel.

Head of Zeus: London 9781035909629 256 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)