The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.