Trace Elements by Donna Leon
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Trace Elements
By Donna Leon
Grove Atlantic, 2020
For such a tried and trusted old hand as Donna Leon, even small stumbles come as shocks, and her latest book, Trace Elements, the twenty-ninth installment in the Venetian adventures of Commissario Guido Brunetti series, seems to start with three in rapid succession. The novel opens with Brunetti and his Questura colleague Claudia Griffoni walking along a canal, sweltering in the heat of a July day that’s magnified by all the surrounding white buildings. “The broad riva gave no quarter to anyone walking along it,” we’re told, “the white surface of the stone worked in consort with the sun,” and the reading mind stops and reaches instantly for “in concert” and can’t think “in consort” can be made quite right. Then Brunetti and Griffoni see an industrial crane dredging a section of the canal. “With wild surmise,” we’re told, “[Brunetti] exclaimed, ‘I haven’t seen this done for years,’” and the reading mind halts again, thinking surely, surely that should be ‘wild surprise’? Unlike the imaginative stretch that might just possibly include “in consort,” surely the variation here can’t be salvaged by poetic license? Surely Brunetti cannot be wildly surmising something he’s right at that moment watching, can he? And what about that moment? We’re told that Brunetti “stood motionless, his right foot poised above the first step of the bridge,” and the reading mind stops a third time: Brunetti stops stock still? Balancing on one foot with the other poised in mid-air? Has anyone in the history of the world done that in such a moment?
We can, fortunately, chalk such things up as first-page mulligans; the rest of the book proceeds with the smooth, practiced ease of precision clockwork. Brunetti and Griffoni are on their way to a hospice at the behest of a woman who has barely any time to live and wants to talk to the police. Predictably (this is, after all, a murder mystery), she can only manage to croak out a few ambiguous words about illicit money and an unavenged murder, presumably of her late husband, who’d died in what appeared to be a motorcycle accident but who’d been involved in with a company tasked with assessing the quality of Venice’s canal water.
What unfolds from this beginning is a satisfyingly multifaceted mystery that develops some oddly subdued tones. The narrative is oppressed on virtually every page with the heat and humidity of Venice in high summer (characters are forever daubing themselves), and the nature of the crime brings familial concerns to the surface for every character - including Brunetti, whose own father briefly comes into focus:
Brunetti’s father, although he had been a manual worker at the port, loading and unloading ships, was a man of rigorous honesty. He was a labourer, but he read Marx and Thomas Aquinas. He sometimes drank too much, but he could quote enormous passages of Foscolo and Leopardi.
At one point Brunetti even thinks about his own retirement, reflecting on the certainty that people will go right on hurting each other and committing crimes long after he’s turned in his service weapon and surrendered his ability to interrogate people in the city’s streets. And his working relationship with Griffoni is rendered in appealingly vulnerable terms. “They had been together in situations of great physical danger,” he thinks at one point, “yet it was her grace in dealing with people who’d come untethered in reaction to loss or betrayal that had impressed, and steadied, him most.”
These crepuscular notes tame the momentum of Trace Elements, but Leon’s books have always been more conversational than combustive. Our heroes persevere through the heat and the red herrings, and the book’s final act will have readers hoping Brunetti keeps postponing that retirement indefinitely.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.