Critics have been confused by the novelist Amanda Craig (this is her ninth novel) because she tackles big, troubling subjects but within highly readable narratives.
I consumed this one – multilayered, full of discreet wisdom and wit, within 36 hours.
The Three Graces of the title call to mind La Primavera by Botticelli. But, here, they refer to three 80-something female friends who are among the expats trying to live (the end of) their best lives in Santorno, a Tuscan hill town.
There they face the problems peculiar to this fool’s paradise – free of doctors just when you pass your physical peak.
There is Diana, an Oldie-reader and impoverished aristocrat, whose husband, Perry, an arrogant philanderer and ex-colonial racist with years of entitlement syndrome behind him, is now demented, in a wheelchair and dependent on dutiful Diana.
There is prosperous Ruth, still on HRT, an American-born retired consultant psychotherapist. She sold the one-time hovel in Belsize Park, which she’d transformed into a ‘white stuccoed palace’, and swapped it for the ruins of a large abandoned Tuscan farmhouse with 20 hectares. It’s now an eco-paradise kept going by WWOOFs (Willing Workers On Organic Farms).
And there is well-pensioned Marta, a concert pianist, who, owing to aches and pains, which the three old ladies have a pact never to discuss among themselves, still gives one public concert a year. ‘My life is all D minor now; I will never hear the major key.’
All three women have dogs but, more to the point in this multi-generational novel, they all have grandsons – and these three turn up in Santorno.
Hedge-funder Olly has come for his wedding to an influencer with three million followers – 25-year-old Tania, the most beautiful girl most people have ever seen.
She is constantly likened to the Botticelli in the Uffizi: ‘She was exquisitely proportioned, her eyes, her lips, her nose, her hips – like a mathematical calibration of female perfection.’ But Tania who is followed and cat-called everywhere she goes because of her beauty – and suffers from panic attacks and mental-health problems like so many of her generation – has a secret reason for wanting to marry hedge- funder Olly – and it’s not his money.
Xan, the grandson of Marta, who has graduated with a First but is tutoring because he cannot find a proper job, is particularly vocal about his resentment of the generational divide: ‘Your generation had free tuition, no student debt, cheap council mortgages, proper jobs, the lot. Of course you could buy a second home in Tuscany. We can’t even buy one. No matter how hard we work, most of us will never have anything but crap jobs for ever.’
The generational divide, both moral and financial, is a major theme. Ruth is disgusted by the sickening amount of free products delivered to her farmhouse for Tania to display as she posts every step of her wedding preparation on Instagram.
Ruth does not understand the new jobs such as influencer and hedge-funder, which ‘didn’t even exist ten years ago’.
Marta is horrified that the only people who still treasure classical music ‘seemed to be the old and dying, and this was an almost unbearable thing because when the audience for classical music was gone, the essence of the human spirit would be no more.’ Diana observes the changes that have afflicted aristocrats. ‘From having been admired and feted, anyone upper class was now supposed to be a brute, a scoundrel and a thief.’
Another running theme is how Tuscany has changed with the annual influx of 300,000 immigrants into Italy. Enzo, 40, the last local still living on the hillside, who helps out the three old ladies with driving and odd jobs, is allowed to give free rein to his racist thoughts.
‘Nothing was as alarming as the migrants, whose numbers, hundreds of thousands each year, were seen as a visible manifestation of everything that was wrong in the world. Crime had soared: not the familiar Italian kinds such as the bribery of officials or using the black market, but robberies, drugs and assault. All these, Enzo was now certain, were the fault of foreigners.’
Bitter Enzo, whose family have lived in the same farmhouse for hundreds of years (as tenants), is now the only person who knows how to look after the land in the old way but, as a tenant, he has no security.
And love, of course, is another of the big themes within this most ingeniously plotted and ultimately satisfying novel. There’s much more to it than just readability.
Mary Killen appears on Gogglebox with her husband, The Oldie’s Giles Wood. Together they wrote Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs
