Sarah Dunant: The Birth of Venus

Reviewed by SUSANA CARRYER*

Told in deceptively simple prose through the voice of a 14-year-old girl, this is a complex story of religion and politics, love and betrayal, set at the end of the 15th century in Florence.

This is Sarah Dunant's first historical novel - she is more familiar as a writer of thrillers such as Transgressions and Mapping the Edge, both being adapted as films.

The Birth of Venus captures the impact of the turbulent events of the period on one small Florentine family, and in particular on the youngest daughter.

Allessandra is an artistic and highly intelligent girl, just about to be married.

In her hometown, the luxurious and morally lax excesses of the ruling Medici family are being challenged by a fundamentalist monk preaching hellfire and brimstone. Against this background she tells the story of the tensions and complexities of her relationships with family and with the two significant men in her life.

As the charismatic monk gains power, religious intolerance makes Allessandra's own love of painting and classical philosophy become as dangerous as any overt moral deviance. In this era of fear and repression, an educated woman is considered as morally deficient as a prostitute, and both risk torture, imprisonment or death by hanging or burning.

Dunant skilfully weaves the story of the unusual relationship between Allessandra and her new husband, exploring the very real affection born of a shared aesthetic sense and similarly politically astute minds, placing these things alongside the double standards that, despite the apparent similarities, leaves Allessandra trapped and helpless in a way her husband will never experience.

In a world where politics and religion are inextricably linked, and atheism is inconceivable, the reader is drawn into the agonies of a young woman trying to make sense of her own spirituality. On one side she has a church that is threatening to torture the people she loves, and is burning and destroying everything that is beautiful in her city. On the other side is a church in which popes and cardinals take mistresses and sell God's absolution to line their own pockets. Neither of them allow women a place, or even a brain.

Torture of homosexual men, murder of prostitutes and illicit lovers, and questions around slavery, are an integral part of this novel.

However the real power of the book lies in the central female characters. Allessandra, it becomes clear, has inherited both her intelligence and her refusal to fulfil the expectations of others from her mother. As this admirable woman tries to teach her daughter how to survive in a world ruled by men and their interpretation of religion, the relationship between the two is credibly explosive.

Erila, Allessandra's slave and nursemaid since infancy, as well as friend, confidante and accomplice, is herself a woman of enormous strength and personality, far more astute and aware of power dynamics than her young charge. Between them these three challenge the norms of the day, each in their own way, and through them Dunant brings this period in history alive.

Little Brown, $34.95

* Susana Carryer is an Auckland theologian.