The Fallen is a short, tense novel that lays bare the wreckage left when war has moved on. What happens after armies roll through? Countless novels engage with the tensions of battle and the terrible consequences of conflict. War fascinates readers and, as a subject, war is perennially inviting material.
But only a few novels go one step further and depict the mess that war leaves behind. The dreadful scars of conflict enable no easy resolution, even though most postwar stories tend to feature reconciliation, a return to the ordinary that discounts the aftermath of occupation.
The Fallen, by Stephen Finucan, Viking Canada, 206 pages, $32
Stephen Finucan dares to imagine that brutal aperture in the historically laden and unpredictable city of Naples close to the end of the Second World War. Set in the months after the arrival of the British troops, who “liberated” the city from the Germans in the fall of 1943, and before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in March, 1944, The Fallen portrays the tensions that follow presumed deliverance.
Naples in 1944 was a city intent on devouring itself. Facilities were utterly disrupted. Hunger and typhus ruled. Looting and profiteering were commonplace, and revenge and denunciation fuelled old conflicts. As a port city and shipping depot, Naples saw tons of military cargo. Not all supplies got to where they were supposed to go; shockingly, at least one third of everything that reached dockside “disappeared.”
The black market thrived, and the occupiers competed with the Camorra (the region's criminal organization) to extort and smuggle goods. As one of the criminals in the novel muses, “In those first chaotic weeks after the Allies had reached the city, there was almost too much to take.”
Such confusion invites bargains and betrayal. Finucan evokes this anarchic moment with tight, evocative writing that makes The Fallen a compelling and instructive read. How do ordinary people survive such upheaval? What trade-offs enable them to make ends meet? How can people desperate for food and for work put their shattered lives back together?
The most destructive aspect of war is how it ultimately dishonours humanity, how the urgency of desperation enables all that is loathsome
The novel revolves around a cast of characters who face this historical trial from different perspectives. Their interactions with one another and with the brutal circumstances that delineate their lives are key to the novel's success.
Aldo Cioffi is a petty rogue who survived by supplying bogus certificates of health to prostitutes during the war. Now, he drowns his decline in alcohol and betrays everyone; stupidly, he gets involved with the most ruthless branch of the Camorra.
His uncle, Augusto Parente, is chief curator of the National Archeological Museum, a treasure trove of historical objects, which the Americans decree must be inventoried. One of the scholars who helped to dig out the ruins of Pompeii, Parente is political out of necessity rather than belief. His chief concern is for the artifacts in his museum, and how they are vulnerable to light-fingered thieves, whether military occupiers or not.
Luisa Gennaro, Parente's chief assistant, is a young woman racked with guilt and grief; her brother was killed in the war and her father and mother have died of typhus. She does penance for her loss with steely impassivity, mistrusting herself as much as everyone around her while she works alongside Parente to try to protect Naples's heritage.
Into this chaos comes Thomas Greaves, a Canadian transferred to Naples to recover after he has suffered a breakdown. Responsible for a horribly botched artillery barrage that killed a schoolhouse full of innocent women and children, Greaves has lost his bearings, and lost his sense of himself.
