The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag

But what could be more apt for this great collector of valuable objects than to have also been collecting the very principle of destruction, a volcano.  Collectors have a divided consciousness.  No one is more naturally allied with the forces in a society that preserve and conserve.  For the very excessiveness of the collecting passion makes a collector also a self-despiser.  Every collector-passion contains within it the fantasy of its own abolition.  Worn down by the disparity between the collector's need to idealize and all that is base, purely materialistic, in the soul of a lover of beautiful objects and trophies of the glorious past, he may long to be purged by a consuming fire.

William Hamilton is the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, an Italian monarchy comprised of the island of Sicily and the lower part of the Italian peninsula.  He resides in an immense palace at Naples.  He is a collector; he collects paintings, sculptures, artifacts of historical or biological or geological importance.  He collects the volcano itself, in his way, building a huge windowed room backed with mirrors so that he might see it.  He makes pilgrimages to it, collects volcanic rock.  The volcano, of course, with its unpredictable nature and capacity for ruination, can't really be collected at all.  Experiences can be collected like lava rocks, but in the end the volcano will defy the attempt.  He knows all that, but then again, every collector knows that to really complete a collection is like a kind of death.  If you collect volcanoes, you'll never have that problem.

Hamilton--typically just called "The Cavaliere"--marries twice, once to a faithful woman who dies early, and again to a young and beautiful actress who captures his passion late in life.  His second wife, Emma, is renowned in Neapolitan society for her "attitudes"--a series of frozen tableaux in which she depicts, with uncanny likeness, the heroines of Greek myth.  She loves the Cavaliere, who's devoted to her, but the real love of her life is the British naval hero Horatio Nelson, who enters their life when Naples is threatened by French-style revolution and Napoleon in turn.  Nelson, "the hero," befriends the Cavaliere and falls in love with his wife.  The Cavaliere doesn't exactly like being the cuckolded husband, but as a life goes, it's not so bad.

The Volcano Lover is a meaty historical novel, which might seem like a strange production from someone like Sontag, who's better known as an essayist and a critic.  But much of it feels like an essay.  The historical Hamilton's passion spurs Sontag into a long meditation on collecting as an activity.  We find out that collecting: is a sport, it unites and isolates, is dissembling, is not about completeness, is both sociable and piratical, is menaced by the imponderables that can bring disaster, is lust, etc., etc.  A lot of these observations and digressions are fascinating.  But they are part of a narrative mode that keeps the characters at arms' length (they are the Cavaliere, the hero, the Cavaliere's wife, identifiable chiefly by their reputations) and divulges in a lot of intrusive anachronism (the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum are compared to the "twin urbanicide" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).  I found it difficult to devote my entire attention to it.

Disaster comes for the Cavaliere not in the form of the volcano, but a human likeness of it: the French Revolution.  The French create a short-lived republic in Naples after driving the court, Hamilton included, to Palermo.  It lasts only a few months, but all three of the main characters become politically implicated in the bloody suppression of subversive elements after the city is recaptured.  Their reputations are shattered--except for Nelson's, never much more than his own legend, for whom Trafalgar is yet to come--and their recall to England is shameful and debilitating.  The Cavaliere's collections are lost when the French invade, and his wife lost to Nelson, but who could have foreseen that he'd lose even the volcano?

The novel ends with a series of first-person accounts: one by the Cavaliere and one by his wife.  These accounts, for me, signify a novel that might have been, one that lives up to the historical novel's promise of transport by dropping us into the consciousness of those who lived.  The Cavaliere is elegiac, his wife, resentful, and for good reason--she argues with some persuasiveness that, as is the fate of many women, she was never anything other than what people demanded her to be.  There's an account by her mother, which is especially tedious

 But the most interesting choice of the entire novel might be Sontag's decision to close it with a first-person account by Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, an executed revolutionary who ran a newspaper for the Neapolitan republic.  We've just been wrenched into empathy for the Cavaliere and his wife, but Pimentel, on her way to the scaffold, wants us to cast a more suspicious eye.  "I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable," she writes, as if jabbing a finger right into Emma Hamilton's eye, "Thus do all women including the author of this book."  She adds that she "cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being.  They thought they were civilized.  They were despicable."  What is that but, volcano-like, an exploding of all the pretensions so carefully detailed over the 400 preceding pages?