High Tide by Livia Franchini: ‘Go out with a bang’  

I enjoyed Livia Franchini’s debut, Shelf Life, enough to put up my hand for High Tide when I spotted it on NetGalley. Franchini’s second novel follows two timelines: one in the 1990s when Mary Godwin is thinking of dropping out of university, and one in the 2020s when the horror writer she’s become finds herself forced to remember her well-hidden past.

Nostalgia: a feeling that I have spent the last three decades trying to outrun.

Mary’s the daughter of a renowned art historian keen for her to take the same route he’s followed himself. She, however, wants to become a writer, fighting her corner, moving from Oxford to London and taking up a place studying literature. When she meets Peter Shelley, a mature art student already making his name, they fall into an obsessive passion for each other which will see them taking off for Italy when Peter’s installation gets him into trouble with the law. They head for Florence, staying with Mary’s stepsister Clare who’s become infatuated with Peter’s womanising best friend, Noel, much to Mary’s disgust, before moving on to Pisa where Noel’s father has an apartment they can use. Clare already forgotten, Noel turns up with a beautiful, aloof Italian woman, joined not long after by Trelawney who Noel calls the Pirate. A hedonistic summer ensues ending in violence and tragedy. Thirty years later, Mary, known only by her pen name by her many fans, is faced with a retrospective of Peter’s work which Trelawney is enthusiastically promoting, returning to Pisa trying to cover her tracks.

Unlimited time, money and promise. No pressures from the external world and a long hot summer ahead. On paper, it was practically Arcadia.  

Although it’s not mentioned in either the publicity material or Franchini’s acknowledgements (at least in the proof I read), the penny dropped early on that her novel is a reimagining of Mary Godwin’s marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley with a few liberties taken. Alternating between past and present, Mary tells us her story, with the middle section of the novel set during the torrid summer when her Peter’s manic obsession with his work fractured their marriage while relations becoming increasingly strained in a household too small to contain such large egos. Mary’s present-day realisation that she’s about to be exposed and the aftermath of the exhibition neatly frames her narrative. She’s already told us she’s an unreliable narrator, that each of the players in this drama will have a different version: Franchini’s brilliant ending takes full advantage of that with its last-minute intervention offering a twist, or maybe not. An enjoyable, clever piece of fiction whose evocative descriptions of Italian art and architecture cheered up a dull November.

Annabel also enjoyed this one. You can read her review here.

Doubleday: London 9780857526687 336 pages Hardback (NetGalley)