Snow White in Tuscany

The House of Borgia was one of the most ruthless families in 16th century Italy,known for cruelty,murder,intrigue,incest and a lust that rivalled their appetite for power. Cesare,a friend of Niccolo Machiavelli,was the model for his manual of realpolitik,The Prince.
A man who sins as fiercely as he craves for penance,Cesare forces Vicente to leave his motherless child behind and go off on a quest for three apples of the Tree of Knowledge. Lucrezia,her brother’s lover and a willing agent of her family’s ambition,promises to look after Vicente’s daughter. When Cesare gets drawn to Bianca’s beauty and tries to seduce the child,Lucrezia’s jealousy is aroused. She calls for a hunter to take the girl to the woods and cut her heart out.

Fairy tales get socked into full-bodied life in Maguire’s hands. His 1995 cult hit,Wicked,turned Oz’s hated Wicked Witch of the West into a sympathetic character. In Mirror,Mirror (first published in 2003 but being re-released this year for a wider audience),he teases out the darkness at the heart of the fairy tale and fashions a rich,complicated universe,always brooding on the brink of change. No Disney cuteness here. Maguire brings in “shit and gold and blood and the juice of whores”. The dwarfs,most prone to sugary characterisations,become mysterious creatures of the underworld,who are also propelled along a journey of change,towards that paradoxical human state — consciousness.

As a child living in wondrous awe of the world visible from the rooftops of Montefiore,Bianca is an attractive creature,with sudden depths of silence. She is aware that the world is a place of competitive explanations — “Your mother went to heaven and became an angel,” says Fra Ludovico; “When your mother died,she died,” says Primavera firmly. It’s only later in the narrative that she suffers the passivity that comes with being a symbol of innocence.

The prime movers of this novel are the Borgias,characters of unbridled appetite. Lucrezia,especially,is as fascinating an overreacher as you will find in Renaissance literature: a woman who marries several times to advance her family,who is in love with her brother,the wealthy patroness who commissioned Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso and a woman ultimately in thrall of her own impulse to evil.

The narrative falters in the latter half as the sub-plot of Vicente’s quest for a branch of the Tree of Knowledge is never tied up. Bianca’s frequent lapses into sleep and unconsciousness drag the narrative. But the rich,evocative language,deft characterization and the imaginative breadth of Maguire’s universe carry the reader along.

“The world is a terrible place to be in,” Vicente tells his daughter,the seven-year-old. Seventeen years later,Bianca is woken from her sleep,not by a prince but the kiss of the hunter who could not kill her. As she walks up to Montefiere in “true time,true dust,true air” to meet her broken father,it’s a world we hope she has learnt to embrace.