The Tempest. Juan Manuel de Prada. Sceptre. £14.99 UK.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

From Adam's navel to the Mona Lisa's smile, the art world is full of mysteries, making it rich territory for a detective novel, or a detective novel cum romance cum art history which is what Manuel de Prada's first appearance in English is, or aims to be.

To travel hopefully, as Robert Louis Stevenson had it, is a better thing than to arrive, and certainly Alejandro Ballesteros, The Tempest's central character, would seem to agree. For one thing, as the archetypal art critic, this young Spanish academic finds it difficult to connect with flesh and blood and is happier to keep the world at a distance. For another, his first trip to Venice to view his particular obsession -- Giorgione's enigmatic painting of the title -- practically upon his arrival finds him clutching in his arms the victim of a bizarre murder. Indeed, it would appear that this death must catapult Ballesteros back into life - into a world where art, for some at least, means passion, and passion, like money, is something to kill or die for.

The journey of discovery begins with the revelation that the murder victim is a notorious art dealer and forger, and is intriguingly complicated by the fact of the dead man's relationship with the father and daughter duo who are the visiting art critic's hosts. Glimpses behind the façades, and masks, of Venetian society and carnival provide further complication -- though they offer no great variation on the usual set-piece -- but for a man like Ballesteros who sees the university as a place where 'as in most needy families, everything is handed down from one generation to the next' it is inevitably the father/daughter mystery that attracts.

The truth though is that the many efforts de Prada goes through to concoct a romantic complication between Ballesteros and Chiara, the young painting restorer whose name, incidentally, means light, are themselves little more than painting by numbers. Prolonged musings on the asymmetry of first his landlady's and then his beloved's behind -- not to mention the items of underwear entrapped in each as a result of climbing ladders and steps than you'd find at a St Patrick's Day parade -- fall far short of developing the element of bloodlessness that might have helped distinguish his character, and repeating passages verbatim (the same landlady appears 'with all the darkness of the night centred on her pubis' on maybe half a dozen occasions) is not the same thing as the lyrical eroticism promised in the early chapters.

What truth and fiction, reality and art, are or are not has a place in fiction, but only when the discussion involves and affects the characters concerned. A wonderful passage on methods used by famous art forgers, and descriptions such as 'the gondola slid through the water with the bloodless ease of a knife penetrating flesh' mean de Prada will likely be compared to Banville, but the comparison will be hard on de Prada. As any art critic will testify, a dozen or so pages of wonderful writing, like a concealed navel or a mesmerising smile, on their own do not a compelling portrait make.

© copyright Pat Boran