Monday, November 19, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri




The Book of Hidden Things is an example of a SF/F subgenre that's always hard to define: the story that offers the possibility of fantastical elements but never makes it clear whether or not those elements are real.  What it most definitely is is a story about friendship between a bunch of middle-age men whose lives have not gone in directions they really anticipated, and what that friendship still means.  Which is not to say that this is a sober book at all, as events spiral out of control fairly quickly.

And the result is a pretty impressive novel, that frequently takes turns that surprised me in where the plot was going.  Note that this is not a "light" novel (as the trigger warning below should make clear) - events get pretty damn dark as the story progresses.  But the character work of the main characters (and one side character) is really well done and the setting is incredibly well done as well, resulting in a book that is well worth your time.

Minor Trigger Warning: Animal Cruelty, both off-page and on-page.


 -----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------  
Childhood friends Art, Fabio, Tony, and Mauro grew up together in the small Italian town of Puglia, which they each longed to escape.  But when they went off after high school, they made a Pact - one day every year they'd each return for a reunion back at the pizza place in town to catch up, no matter what else they were doing with their lives.

Now, years later, the friends are all grown up.....and each is secretly miserable in ways they're ashamed to share with the others.  But when they return for the Pact this year, Art - their leader, the one who thought up the pact - fails to appear.  Art's failure to appear calls to mind a time when he was 14 and Art disappeared for a whole week...and refused to tell them afterwards what had happened.

Worried about him, the friends search through town for signs of what happened to Art, with the search leading them to a debunked Christian saint, the local mafioso, and the realization that Art may have gone off the deep end as he wrote a book - The Book of Hidden Things.  But the search for Art will reveal to each of Fabio, Tony, and Mauro the truths about themselves and their friends' lives, and soon takes a turn out of any of their control.
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This book alternates between Fabio, Tony, and Mauro's points of view (although there are two excerpts from Art's writing contained within, we never see his or anyone else's point of view directly).  Still, in doing so it creates four (as Art's story is told through the others) really well done fully developed characters, for whom it became quite easy to care about.  Each of the three took different routes from where they left each other half in school, with Fabio trying to fulfill his dream instead of being reasonable, Mauro trying to be reasonable than to try to live out a dream, and Tony falling somewhere in between, and all are miserable in different ways, making them each a bit ashamed of their own lives.

But as the book goes on, and as the story shows us more of each of the trio and Art's lives, it becomes clear to each of them, and to the reader, how things haven't turned out as they appeared for each of them, and I grew to care about them quite a bit.  And of course there's Art, the one who brought them all together at first but whose life has been the most messed up of all.  Each of the trio had different formulative experiences with Art and through their points of view we see a picture of who Art was, and why the trio all care about him enough to go through with the plot as it gets crazier and crazier.

One thing you may notice is that all of the above referenced characters are men: there are only three women characters of note in this book, and your mileage may vary as to whether the book treats them well.  I loved Tony's sister Elena, who married a man connected with the local mafioso - to Tony and his family's dismay - and has, without their realizing it, become more of the mafia that her husband ever was by this point in the story.  I really wished by the end that we got to see some of the events in this story from her point of view, but we never do and her motivations and beliefs are left for the reader to guess.

As to the other two - Mauro's wife Anna is the one I suspect people might have conflicted feelings about (I saw one review take issue with her portrayal for example), as a major plot point is that Fabio has always had a crush on her and those feelings are not unrequited.  Anna isn't portrayed as simply a prize for the boys to fight over, and clearly is a strong independent person of her own....but the book isn't quite great about making those feelings seem believable (Anna's declaration of which man she loves is never really backed up by her actions and the book seems to want us to take it as granted).   The third woman character is treated basically as a crazy woman wrapped up in Art's madness, and is more of a plot point than a character, so yeah that one doesn't work as well.

I should point out the plot gets pretty damn wacky when you think about it, with the trio getting involved with the local police, the local mafia, and accusations of successful faith healing and false sainthood.  The guys are completely out of their depth in this one, and it makes it very easy to want to read where the plot is going next, except near the end where it gets pretty damn dark as the book heads towards its conclusion.

The end result is a pretty strong book for an author who's apparently a successful SF/F writer in Italian but is debuting here in English.  I look forward to his next English work quite a bit, as long as it contains less of the animal cruelty at least.
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