Night’s Lies is a historical novel that deals with the lives and adventures of revolutionaries in an age of conspirators and Carbonari (Eighteenth-century revolutionaries), a world of vast political and intellectual agitation. The principal character is a ‘God-fearing sanguinary brigand’ who has lived on the run for forty years, wreaking havoc across the countryside. Not your average eighteenth-century crook or footpad, he is said to be ‘of vast intelligence’ and, while looting monasteries and country houses, will ‘ransack the library for books to read.’


Perhaps the novel doesn’t quite carry off its rhetorical code of ‘ye olde’-speak. It is, however, full of striking images of an existence infinitely strange and yet still familiar to us, like the seminary in which a young orphan is brought up — a male, black-clad world in which the older orphans serve as adults for the younger ones.


If the literary or linguistic style is a sub-archaic torture of modern prose, the question becomes; is it entertaining, creatively benign and even evocative, or is it just silly and tiresome?

‘The storm had blown itself out. As if hacked into a hundred pieces by the swish of a gigantic sabre, the cowling of black clouds permitted slats to reappear here and there between the shreds. Mingling with the succulent damp of the soil, the air grew sultry. One last rumble of thunder, deprived of vehemence, like the growl of a well-fed mastiff, was heard fading away far out over the water, where sea and sky raised a single barbican of darkness.’ p90