The Good Italian - Stephen Burke

War and Morality

The first thing that attracted me to this book was the setting. 1935 in Italian occupied Eritrea is an interesting time and place, not quite war time, but moving in that direction. The second thing that interested me was the title. The Italian perspective of the events that brought them into the war on the side of the Germans is complex and rarely covered in fiction, so a look at them from the view of a "good Italian" also promises an intriguing moral angle on the situation.

Stephen Burke's novel doesn't disappoint on either of those questions - or at least not until the latter chapters that seem to bring some of the most interesting events leading up to the war in North Africa to a rather hurried conclusion. Initially however, there is indeed something Graham Greene-like about the moral position of Enzo Sacchi, a young man from Genoa who finds himself harbourmaster at the port of Massawa. With Italy about to expand their colonisation of the region, does Enzo even have any say in whether he follows the orders that will bring death and devastation to Ethiopia.

Enzo has another dilemma over whether he is being complicit in the exploitation of the natives when he takes on a cook/cleaner, expecting her to also share his bed. It's common among his friends to have Eritrean mistresses, but in Enzo's case, he wants to believe that Aatifa isn't being forced into the arrangement. Just to complicate matters, the Italian authorities are planning to clamp down heavily on such "fraternisation" with those of "inferior race". Enzo likewise believes that he and his compatriots are bringing order, development, civilisation to a deprived region and that sometimes war is necessary to achieve that, so Enzo's role as a "good Italian" is not so clear-cut.

Burke manages to treat this situation realistically then, if not quite with the deep existential anguish of a Graham Greene character. This leads things to unravel somewhat in the latter part of the book, particularly when the war extends into the region. We get some perspective on this from the experience of Enzo's friend Salvatore - and find out about some horrifying war crimes - but it's a little too cursory in this area and seems more concerned with resolving the romance story. Neither aspect rings true or realistic in its resolution, but that doesn't detract too much from the qualities of the novel elsewhere.