Surviving, By Allan Massie

Hemingway stirs among the ruins

It can't be said that either the locales or the cast of Allan Massie's new novel particularly entice. Set in a minutely itemised modern Rome,
Surviving features a spiritless collection of expatriate bar-flys, some sufficiently reformed to hang out at AA meetings in Via Napoli, others still gallantly drinking themselves into a stupor.

They include middle-aged Belinda and her chum Kate; Stephen, a marinading Anglican priest and his actor boyfriend; and sixty-something Tom Durward, a former Hollywood screenwriter with a gammy hip and, perhaps more disabling, a Hemingway fixation.

Hemingway's ghost surfaces regularly here: in the alcohol-charged conversations; in the conviction that insobriety gives you insight and most obviously in the mid-plot detonation of violence. Kate turns out to be a bestselling writer, specialising in the criminal mind, who invites her latest subject, Gary – a youngster acquitted of racial murder – on a research weekend. When Reynard Yallett, the right-wing journalist who led his press defence, arrives in Rome, and gets topped (by Gary) after trying to rape Kate, a plot has to be hatched to dispose of the body.

In letting this low-key domestic drama explode into violent death, Massie sets himself a potentially fatal challenge: harmonising the paraphernalia of bloody carpets and solemn drives through the Italian dawn with the much less visceral neurotics' chatter that has gone before. That he succeeds is a testimony not only to the quality of the writing – as tense as the sensibilities on display – but to the devious back-story that lets the reader know that justice has been done.

Not everything in Surviving convinces. The literary cosmopolitanism becomes self-conscious, and not even Hemingway could make drunks' chatter indefinitely sustaining. Yet none of this detracts from the power of the elegiac meditations on past time, blighted hopes and the stream of ground-down lives. Hats off to Massie's current sponsors, but it's a shame that a novel demanding the widest circulation has to be brought out by a paperback imprint on the Isle of Lewis.