- Pieta, by Michael Fitzgerald. Transit Lounge, $29.99.
The Italian sculptor, Michelangelo, was 24 when he created what is possibly his greatest work of art. It was the Pietà - the Pity - carved from marble and depicting the body of Jesus being held by Mary after the Crucifixion, displayed in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. In 1972, Laszlo Toth, a disturbed Hungarian-born Australian, attacked the sculpture with a hammer, breaking off Mary's left arm and damaging her face. Toth spent two years in a mental hospital before being deported back to Australia. He died in 2012. It took almost a year to restore the Pietà, and the work is now secured behind bullet-proof glass.
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Michael Fitzgerald has been the editor of Art Monthly Australasia since 2014, and his second novel spins an artful web around Michelangelo's masterpiece. Lucy, who grew up in Canberra and remembers an art school assignment about attempting a painting based on Toth, is heading for Rome, following the death of her mother. She takes work as an au pair near Paris as the clock ticks down on the millennium with its supposedly doomsday Y2K bug. Lucy's mother, Jude, was an artist and nun, and happened to be in the Basilica when the Pietà was damaged. In the confusion, Jude had picked up, unnoticed, a small "fingernail" of splintered marble, which Lucy now carries, together with her mother's diary. Lucy had been asked by her mother to deliver a small unexplained parcel to Rome.
The chapters are short, with first-person narrative from Jude (presumably from the diary) and third person for Lucy. The story ricochets between 1972 (the year of the Toth attack on the Pietà) 1973 and 1999, with each chapter carefully labelled by day and date, but occasionally out of sequence. Perhaps I'm suffering Covid induced lassitude, but this staccato effect seemed less than inherently useful. Lucy's au pair duties involve looking after Felix, the infant son of Mathilde, who is researching Australian Aboriginal art, and Jean-Claude, who knows a lot about Napoleon's Josephine, and her interest in Australian plants. He introduces Lucy to his artist friend, Sebastian, whose voice was "resonant" like the Carillon Bells on Lake Burley Griffin. At this point I thought the plot might thicken, but no, Lucy is set for Rome, and a perhaps unlikely chance conversation with the same woman who met her mother two decades earlier.
This is a riskily ambitious novel, and maybe we need more of these in our present Covid state of play, but this one wears sophistication on its sleeve a tad too easily. But the underlying tension between mother and daughter, fused by the heat of controversy surrounding Michelangelo's unforgettable sculpture, brings the journey safely home.