SARAH DUNANT, IN THE COMPANY OF THE COURTESAN, LITTLE, BROWN £12.99

Novels by women featuring a male narrator tend to be rare, and most share an odd trait: the man usually has something wrong with him, mentally or physically. Perhaps women can’t fully imagine themselves into what it must be like to inhabit a body without a womb, or perhaps we believe men to be less evolved beings. At any rate, it’s strange how often these male narrators tend to be dwarves. A year ago, Debbie Taylor published an excellent erotic novel, The Fourth Queen, narrated by a dwarf; now we have Sarah Dunant’s tale about Fiammetta Bianchini, a sixteenth century Italian courtesan, also narrated by the vertically challenged Bucino.

Dunant’s story begins with a bang, as the Holy Roman emperor’s army blows a hole in the wall of Rome, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops. Fiammetta has already laid her plans for defence in the shape of a banquet. When the first of the invaders arrive, she opens her doors and welcomes them to her table and bed, thus earning her household a defence of sorts. But although her actions save her life, and that of Bucino, she is shorn of her glorious golden hair and escapes only with such jewels as they can both swallow while pretending to pray. It’s a gorgeously funny start to a rip-roaring tale in which gutsy vulgarity and ferocious academic intelligence run hand-in-hand.

Half-starved, they make their way to Venice, which Fiammetta left as a fourteen-year-old virgin, to be sold by her mother. As the most successful courtesan in Rome, she is not only ravishing but witty and accomplished – the mistress of a cardinal, lampooned by the scurrilous satirist Aretino, whose path, like many Roman refugees of the time, will cross theirs again. Fiammetta expects to find her mother living in comfort on what she has sent back to Venice, but finds her dead and the house a filthy wreck. Worse is to come when their most precious jewel, a great ruby, is stolen – either by the old servant who tended the mother, or by a mysterious blind healer called La Draga. The courtesan and the dwarf have to start all over again, in a city brimming with competition from young women almost as clever and accomplished as Fiammetta – a city that Bucino hates and fears, but which, with the help of a Jewish jewel expert, a Turkish merchant and a book of pornography, Fiammetta must conquer or die.

Love is the only thing a successful courtesan has to fear and sure enough it strikes once Fiammetta has found a new list of rich patrons. The stratagems and subtleties by which she does this are gorgeously rendered, from the lotions and potions with which she keeps her skin smooth, her breath sweet and her hair gold to the second-hand clothes she haggles over to conceal their poverty. Dunant convincingly recreated Renaissance Florence in The Birth of Venus through details of the paints needed by artists, but here she is even better, mingling the charms of Venice with those of Fiammetta, studying her face “as if it was a map of the ocean, (her) own trade route to the Indes” and enduring sodomy to keep her patrons satisfied and her womb empty. When she falls in love with a young aristocrat as beautiful as herself, her explanation that she needed “a little sweetness in with all the bloated flesh and belches” makes her more sympathetic. Dunant’s heroine is no more a feminist than Moll Flanders or Scarlet O’Hara but she embodies the injustice and inhumanity of the Catholic Church’s attitude to women and sex. She is never condemned for selling her body, and sees her beauty as a gift from God by which she can earn an honest living. A particularly enjoyable scene reveals how courtesans use Mass for dalliance and seduction, and “without a word being said, the fish swim into the net.”

The conceit is that Fiammetta is the model for Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino, featured on the jacket, and Titian, like Aretino, has a small part to play in Fiammetta’s success. The formula is one Dunant used before in The Birth of Venus, but this is handled more adroitly partly because its plot works better and partly because Bucino is such an engaging narrator. Through him, Dunant is able to ventriloquise observations about her sex which are more genuinely feminist than her modern detective stories ever managed to be. The last quarter of the story is less satisfactory than what has preceded it, as the dwarf unravels a secret about La Draga and takes on a new responsibility. Nevertheless, if intelligent historical fiction is at all to your taste, it doesn’t come more vividly enjoyable than this.

The New Statesman, April 2006