A terrifying thriller in 2 decades

By Chris Bohjalian

Doubleday. 320 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans

'Someday you'll be looking up and they'll be bombing you," says the chic, acid-tongued Francesca to her 18-year-old sister-in-law Cristina, near the beginning of Chris Bohjalian's addictive, fast-paced, and often frankly terrifying new thriller.

Cristina, third child of a marchese and marchesa, spends her days tending her beloved horse and entertaining her niece and nephew. She teeters on the edge of adulthood, dreaming as she watches German bombers fly overhead of escaping her war-interrupted life for Pisa, or Naples, or Paris.

But in 1943 the conflict that has enveloped Europe is closing in on the Rosati family and their lovely estate in Tuscany, the Villa Chimera. Soon they will be virtual prisoners, captives of Nazis who know the tide of war is turning against them - and who see the ancient Etruscan ruins on the estate as a potential resource to plunder.

A story told in alternating decades, the novel opens in 1955, with a gruesome, almost clinical description of Francesca's murder. For reasons that become clear only toward the novel's end, she has become the first victim of a killer determined to eradicate as many of the aristocratic clan as possible.

It's not obvious at first that the killer is hunting down the surviving members of the Rosati family. But as Bohjalian describes the character and behavior of the Rosatis during the war years, it becomes possible, at least, to imagine a multitude of motives.

Privileged and persecuted at the same time, they are rent by the constant, urgent need to weigh principle and survival, loyalty and appeasement, love and grim reality.

Forced to be hospitable to men increasingly aware that they may be on the losing side of history, the Rosatis find themselves trapped in a web of moral compromise, implicit and explicit threats, and violence that serves as an incessant backdrop to the family life they try so desperately to cultivate.

Looking backward, Cristina says of her grandfather: "Maybe he was on to something when he named the estate after a monster."

In many novels, the reader is encouraged to hope along with a particular personality and root for them to overcome adversity. Here, the undercurrent of simmering violence escalates as a character's hope for tranquillity, neat resolution, or simple escape is subverted and often reversed.

While Bohjalian has written that The Light in the Ruins was partially inspired by Romeo and Juliet, the arc of the narrative is much larger than that of two doomed lovers.

Perhaps in part because of the relative naivete and innocence required to fall in love in such insane circumstances, Cristina and her German soldier seem less compelling characters than other family members, from the clan matriarch Beatrice to her archaeologist son Vittore, and the scarred and yet lovely homicide detective (and self-named) Serafina Bettini, grappling with her own terrible memories of the war.

Bohjalian doesn't judge his conflicted and often ambivalent personas, instead inviting us to imagine ourselves in their shoes.

There are no clear-cut heroes here, but neither are there (with the exception of some sadistic Nazis, and we expect it of them) many clear-cut villains. Whether the Rosati family are judged to be collaborators and Nazi accomplices or victims depends very much on the perspective of other characters (and of the reader).

The writer set himself an ambitious task: illustrating individual character and motivation while describing an ongoing war, propelling the plot forward (and backward), and keeping the reader in suspense as to the killer's identity until all is revealed.

Even if he isn't totally successful at accomplishing all of these, Bohjalian has created an entertaining, thought-provoking, and disturbingly contemporary fictional world in which compassion and outrage are two sides of the same coin.

In this ever-shifting landscape, past deeds hold the key to present consequences, and resolution is found not in rebirth, but in acceptance.

Given his gift for telling detail, empathy for the dilemmas that beset us all, and his impressive track record, there's abundant hope that Bohjalian's next work will produce characters who get under your skin without ripping it open.

There is no getting around the fact that this is a dark book.

Captivated by the propulsive narrative, and hoping Bettini would find the killer, I stayed up late to finish the novel.

I don't recommend this. Sleep was most elusive.

Fling open the shutters. Settle in a comfortable chair. Lock the doors. Then turn to the first page of The Light in the Ruins and let the shadows in.