Vincent Vella: Slippery steps (A Maltese odyssey), Horizons, 407pp.
A prolific author of theatre and fiction, Vincent Vella has come up with his longest, and surely most ambitious, work of fiction so far.
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What is interesting is Vella’s creation of working class life in post-war Valletta, dependent so much on giving members of the British forces a good time- Paul Xuereb
In this novel he brings to life the Valletta of the poorer class and the seamy bars and brothels of the post-World War II years, the sordid ‘clubs’ of the Maltese criminal class in London, and the development of Paul, a working-class boy, brought up mainly by an aunt in Valletta, from a state primary school to University.
His experience of a clamorous child murder, based very closely on the notorious ‘Ġiġa’ murder, instils in him a fascination with crime, leading him to become a crime reporter with the newspaper The Times of Malta and a greatly respected authority on crime.
The main links between the two cities consists in the sudden flight to London of Paul’s young widowed mother Flora, who has been working in a Strait Street bar and has fallen foul of a Maltese tough guy, and the introduction of another Maltese, Reno, who seeks his fortune in London, and ends up being an unimportant private soldier in the army of London criminals.
Much of the novel is taken up with Paul’s relations with Aldo, first a school-mate then a successful lawyer involved in mysterious shady activities whose friendship with Paul is questionable, and his steamy love affairs, his marriage to Marta, who gives him a daughter Francesca, one of the big loves of his life, the failure of this marriage, and Paul’s subsequent formation of what is clearly a very sound relationship with Giulia.
In the last one-third or so of the book, Paul is commissioned by Aldo to write a series of articles on the post-war Maltese crime in London, and uses his time seeking information in that city also to see if he can find his mother. With the aid of Reno, now impoverished but highly religious, he manages to meet her.
While Vella does not make us wait impatiently throughout the book for this to happen, the episode is disappointing, as Flora, now an old woman, does not seem to be enthusiastic about Paul, and shows she has no interest in abandoning the life she has been leading quietly for a good number of years.
Psychologically this makes sense, but the reader cannot help being let down. Vella, however, uses Paul’s London visit to lead to the novel’s last part in which Aldo tries to blackmail Paul into signing an article favouring a criminal associate of Aldo’s.
Paul’s mentor Theo and his ailing and drug-addicted childhood friend Rafel come into action in his defence, and the novel has the happy ending we have been hoping for.
Paul’s profession is writing about crime and criminals, and Vella makes other characters comment that the memory of the child murder in a house close to his in Paul’s childhood and his mother’s connection with shady people followed by her subsequent flight must have determined his decision to write professionally about crime.
This makes the book’s final long episode with its crime thriller nature of a piece with Paul’s life, but it does feel a little added on. What is interesting is Vella’s creation of working class life in post-War Valletta, dependent so much on giving members of the British forces a good time, in which the poor-off could not afford to give their children a sturdy satchel to carry to school, and children’s pastimes were very modest: playing marbles for boys, and beads for girls.
Growing up in Valletta could be exciting for the more adventurous, but it had its dangers and its privations. Vella surely draws on his childhood memories for much of this – the novel in some parts has autobiographical elements – while for the London Maltese scene he states he has used Geoff Dench’s well-known 1975 book and Fergus Linnane’s much more recent (2003) book on the London underworld.
Vella is an author who tries to delve deeply into the psychology of Paul, often lucidly and very helpfully, but at times unnecessarily.
In moments where he takes great decisions, such as when he decides to bid farewell to his emotional reticence and give himself wholly to Giulia, the lengthy psychological descriptions enrich the development of the plot, but at other times all the reader expects is to learn what is being done as it is easy to divine why it’s being done.
He does not go frequently into descriptions of sexual activity but when he does he manages to be sensual without going over the top.
It is a novel that Maltese and many foreign readers will enjoy not only for its story-telling but also for the light it sheds on Malta’s social and political history of the past 50 years.