Prague Nights
By Benjamin Black
Viking, £14.99
Review by Russell Leadbetter
IN the snow-encrusted “heart of winter” of 1599, a bright, ambitious young doctor, Christian Stern, arrives in Prague. His intention is nothing less than to find a place in the court of Rudolf II, King of Hungary and Bohemia, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and there become one of the emperor’s learned men at Hrad?any Castle.
Two unexpected developments speed Stern towards his goal. The first is his discovery, within a few hours of his arrival, of the body of a young woman, a violent hole torn in her throat. The second is the fact that the eccentric Rudolf, it emerges, has dreamt of a star coming from the west, sent by Christ, and a good omen for the throne. The very name of Christian Stern persuades His Majesty that the new young man is indeed that omen.
The emperor tasks Stern with finding out just who killed the young woman. For she is no ordinary woman, or "drab", as a castle sentry contemptuously puts it. Her name is Magdalena Kroll, and she is the daughter of the king’s physician, Dr Ulrich Kroll – and, moreover, she is the emperor’s mistress.
Thus begins what Stern, recalling the episode as a much older man some 50 years later, describes as his “sojourn in the Capital of Magic”, a time when he believed himself to be “the Emperor’s chosen one, the brightest star shining in the imperial firmament”. He sees no reason to heed Dr Kroll’s admonition to leave Prague immediately, it being a place where everything is “tainted and sick”.
As indeed it is. Stern encounters not just Dr Kroll but also the sinister Felix Wenzel, the emperor’s High Steward, one of his cleverest and most feared advisors; Philipp Lang, the immensely powerful Court Chamberlain; and a mocking, mysterious dwarf by the name of Schenckel. There is also a grotesquely fat Papal Nuncio, Girolamo Malaspina, and the emperor’s concubine, Caterina Sardo, a woman of formidable sexual passions. All around Stern is an incense-heavy pall of intrigue; no-one is to be trusted, and many are to be feared. Life is cheap; torture is in ready supply, and the gibbet awaits more than a few.
Benjamin Black is the pen-name of John Banville, the Man Booker Prize-winning (for his 2005 novel, The Sea) Irish writer. Banville has written much historical fiction, of course. His Revolutions trilogy included a book about Johannes Kepler, the court mathematician to Rudolf II, which featured the dwarf Schenckel in an altogether different guise. Banville also has an abiding passion for Prague, having visited the city many times and authored Prague Pictures: Portraits Of A City, in 2003, for Bloomsbury’s Writer And The City series. Black’s website, incidentally, says the US title of the new book is Wolf On A String, which is slightly more evocative than the British version.
Prague Nights manages to convey a vividly claustrophobic sense not just of Prague and its narrow, winding streets but also of the emperor’s retinue and their daily surroundings in the castle. Stern, being young and somewhat feckless, revels in his new-found status as the emperor’s man, and is moreover of an age “when the smallest kindness seemed a token of eternal friendship”. Being young, he is also more concerned with spreading his favours around than with actually trying to find the killer of the hapless Magdalena Kroll.
It takes a while for the real plot to kick in, involving a missing strongbox full of papers detailing Dr Kroll’s accumulated magic, but when it does, it grips the reader, and the sense of foreboding increases. Can Stern trust even those he has grown close to?
Prague Nights is an engrossing read, set in a Europe on the cusp of the Thirty Years’ War – a cataclysm which, writes the older Stern, has “engulfed the world in slaughter, fire and ruin”. Sexual mischief and personal ambition colour the plot as real-life characters – chief amongst them Rudolf, and Philipp Lang – rub up against a convincing cast of fictional ones, from Stern and Schenckel to Wenzel and Magdalena Kroll. The most affecting of them all, however, is Serafina, a beautiful young angelic novice in the Nuncio’s home, whose tongue was torn out by her own brother. “Ah, my poor Serafina,” Stern grieves at one point, “my poor lost girl.”
As Black says in an author’s note at the end, Prague Nights is a historical fantasy. But then, he adds, real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.
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