|
Joseph Kanon 
Speaking with Joseph Kanon, author of Alibi
Q: Why did you set Alibi in Venice, Italy?
A: In The Good German I’d written about a city, Berlin, utterly destroyed by war, morally as well as physically devastated. The ruins were a kind of metaphor for what had happened to the people. This time I wanted to look at a place that had survived (seemingly, anyway) unscathed. No bombs fell on Venice; in 1945 it was not only still intact, but untouched, as if the war had never happened at all. (This was one of the reasons the international set rushed back after the war—the city was as beautiful as ever, with no visible reminders of what had happened.) But of course no city was really untouched. The war had come to Venice too and I wanted to see what kind of legacy it had left.
I was also intrigued because the period is a blank in most books about Venice, certainly in guidebooks. History seems to stop with Napoleon, then skips to Ruskin and Jamesian expatriates and finally the 20s smart set on the Lido. But what happened after? Very little has been written about Venice during the war, I suppose because no battles were fought there. The Veneto, in general, was sober and conservative, concerned with keeping its head down and getting on with business (unlike, say, the more politically volatile industrial cities, Milan or Turin). It had supported the Fascists before the war and was relatively peaceful under the Germans. It seemed, at first glance, to look at its occupiers as another wave of tourists. Still, murder had been committed there and murder is never neutral.
Q: By murder you mean the Holocaust.
A: Yes, the roundup in the ghetto, which is talked about in the book. (Ghetto, by the way, is a Venetian word—the first one was there.) I don’t mean to imply by this that Italy was an eager accomplice. The government, in fact, had been very reluctant to transport its citizens out (unlike many other countries). But once the Germans were in control delay was no longer an option—people were rounded up and sent to their deaths. In a small city like Venice, this must have had a profound effect. Fellow citizens participated, the events were very well known—it would have been difficult to plead ignorance.
And of course the violence extended beyond the roundups. The Veneto was never a battleground between the Germans and the invading Allied armies, but armed resistance activity increased all over the north toward the end of the war. Sabotage, reprisals, partisan fighting—the war was all around Venice, one way or another.
Q: Did you go to Venice to research the book?
A: Not specifically. I’ve been there many times, but a few years ago I started going in the winter and it was then that I first wanted to write about it. The city in winter caught my imagination in a way it never had before. It seemed to me another city, full of atmosphere and with almost none of the theme park quality it can sometimes have in high season. In the summer, Venice belongs to the world, but in the winter it’s reclaimed by the Venetians. I could see the city as it might have been in 1946, when ALIBI is set. And of course all the mist and drizzle and shadowy alleys make a perfect backdrop for a story about secrets and tangled motives. My books always begin with a place and go on from there—the place suggests what the story is going to be. At any rate, ALIBI began with Venice in the winter, so it inevitably became a story where nothing is quite what it seems.
Q: This is the second of your books to be set in the immediate postwar period. What particularly interests you about it?
A: Well, the third, actually, if we count Los Alamos, which takes place during the last months of the war. (And The Prodigal Spy begins in its aftermath, the McCarthy period, so we might even stretch it to four.) I never intended to write again and again about that period, but I keep being drawn back to it, in part, I think, because it’s the hinge of the century, a truly pivotal time. After the first bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, the world became a different place. After the Holocaust was revealed, our moral universe, even our sense of ourselves, at least in the West, could never be the same. Almost everything that happened then, that was decided then (often by people as ordinary and inadequate as we might be now) had profound consequences—created, in fact, the world we’ve inherited.
So it’s a fascinating time in many ways, not least of which is its own reaction to what had just happened. A question that’s always interested me, as a writer, is when is murder acceptable? In 1945 people had just come through the most murderous time in history. WWII may be romanticized now, but it was also the worst bloodletting that has ever been known. About 60 million people were killed (depending on which count you accept)—murder legitimized by war, legitimized grotesquely by race laws, and sometimes not legitimized at all. How do people live with this history—what, in fact, was their alibi? In such a context, when does murder become a crime? Sixty years ago people were forced to ask what constituted a war crime. We’re still asking the same question and probably no nearer to a satisfactory answer—but it’s a question we can never stop asking.
Of course fiction rarely works on such a panoramic scale—you have to bring things into closer focus, personalize them. As one of the characters in The Good German says to an investigator, “A murder in Berlin? My friend, there were millions. Who cares about one?” But one is everything. If we have no moral compass for one, how do we deal with all the others? A moral compass, however, is a complicated thing. In Alibi, I wanted to write a murder story in which the question isn’t ‘who done it?’ But, was it right? And, what price does it exact?
Q: Will you continue to write about this period?
A: Not necessarily, but it still feels contemporary to me. The moral questions it raised are as relevant as ever—and now we have the advantage of distance, some perspective, when we look at them. It’s not a question of nostalgia—the world wasn’t any better then—but of trying to understand how we got to where we are now.
Q: Alibi is a murder mystery, but it’s also an historical novel and a love story. Which part did you most enjoy writing and developing?
A: Oh, the love story. All writing is a kind of empathetic displacement—you have to put yourself inside the story—and what’s better than being in love? I’m always surprised when people tell me that all along they “suspected” Lena or Emma—it would never have occurred to me. You have to be a little bit in love with the character yourself, even on paper, to write a love story.
I find plot the most difficult aspect of writing. There’s a certain puzzle-solving pleasure in doing it and of course it’s what the reader responds to immediately, so you have to give it your full attention if you want to do anything else with the story, but for me fiction writing is about character—what they say to each other, who they are. As one of the characters in Alibi says, “It’s the ultimate mystery, isn’t it? People.”
As for the historical aspect, I enjoy the research, but once you actually start writing you have to put the research aside and hope that you’re saturated with enough detail to let it come out naturally. I like books that teach me something—and I don’t think novels are exempt—but writing about another time is tricky. You can’t be obvious about the research. Too many writers fall back on lists and old product names and period ‘props’—we’re all guilty of this at one time or another—but what you’re really trying to get at is how people thought, what they might have said. And of course there’s the usual pitfall of making a mistake—but then there’s the pleasure (and it is a pleasure) of having readers write you to correct it.
Q: Do you think your background as a book publishing executive has helped you at all as a novelist?
A: No, it’s an entirely different process. You sit down, like anyone else, to a blank piece of paper. If anything, it tends to make me a little more self-conscious. You’re so used to picking out mistakes or awkward bits in a manuscript that there’s an ‘ouch’ factor in spotting your own.
Q: Are there certain books or writers that have been important influences on your work?
A: The whole question of influence is thorny. On the one hand, I think a writer has been influenced by everyone he’s read. We’re all in debt to whatever literature has come before us. No one sensible would risk the comparison by saying he’s been ‘influenced’ by Shakespeare, but hasn’t everyone? He’s part of what we know. On the other hand, every writer’s work is his own—each voice is unique. I think we like to assign ‘influence’ as a convenience, a way of sorting. Whenever my work is compared to John Le Carré or Graham Greene, I’m naturally pleased because they’re writers I very much admire and it’s flattering even to be mentioned in their company, but what’s really being said, I think, is that we share an interest in subject matter, and in moral ramifications, not that the books are similar. If their influence means anything, I think it lies in their demonstrating that it’s possible to write entertainingly and seriously at the same time—they’ve done it and I’m trying to.
|
