Inspirational Sympathy Poems

Dante in Love by AN Wilson – review

As a novelist, biographer and journalist, AN Wilson has so many manifest interests (37 previous titles are listed on the "Also by" page of his latest book) that it's surprising to find proof of a long-cherished passion. Dante, he says here, has been one of the writers whose work and ideas have most interested him since university days – thanks partly to the inspirational writings of Charles Williams, who might have lacked "Dante's wrath" but is close "at heart to his weird quasi-sexual women-mysticism".

Wilson appears to be aware of this, and occasionally looks up from the page to address us in a voice that is presumably meant to be friendly, but comes across as banal. When he's talking about family structures in 13th-century Florence, for instance, he takes the trouble to say quite unnecessarily that "For most people in the west, a family is a little nuclear group, consisting of one or two children and a couple, living together in a flat or house, isolated from the rest of the world"; and when he's discussing Dante's contribution to the Italian language, he insists that we "need to acknowledge there were other people in the peninsula between the Alps and Sicily before he existed, speaking and writing in a language which we can recognise as Italian".

These lapses are part of a failed strategy to sell Dante to a large audience, as are the title and the decision to publish the book in a large format with lots of colour plates. While these efforts don't exactly backfire – Dante's relationship with Beatrice is easily the best-known part of his story, and a handsome book is a handsome book – they don't solve the anxiety that Wilson seems to feel about his project. Which is essentially that a proper appreciation of all Dante's poetry, including the Divine Comedy (In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.") In any event, the overall effect of the book is confusing at best and bewildering at worst. The disagreements between Dante and Boniface, the wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the struggle between competing European powers for domination of the Italian landmass, the formative friendships with Giotto and Corso and others, the flavour of his marriage with his "difficult" Gemma: Wilson gives attention to all these things and more, but in a way that heaps one on top of the other, and therefore lacks drama and definition.