The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Free City by Eric Darton
John O'Brien

Eric Darton. Free City. Norton, 1996. 176 pp. $18.00.

If Hawthorne, Poe, and Kafka had collaborated, Free City may have resulted. Written in the form of a daybook, forty entries in all, by a man whom we know only as L. (we do not know this until quite a ways in, and, in fact, the book is a dictation by L.), Free City records the near overthrow of a politically free German town (this may be a contradiction in terms, but let this pass, the Germans known better for their atrocities than their freedoms) by a Machiavellian figure, Roberto, also known as Rodolpho, who has fled to Germany from Italy. Initially R.’s benefactor and protector, L. leads the way to preventing R.’s ambitions. Inventor, scientist, essayist, chemist, surgeon, and planner of kingdoms, L., with the help of the multilingual F. (a duck) and A., orchard-caretaker and budding dentist (L., despite his amorous acrobatics with A., does not know her age but guesses that she must be older than he because of her “occasional use of archaic verb forms”), thwarts R.’s plans by creating a flawed Air Galleon (airplane, of sorts) from which R. hopes to be able to destroy the Free City. L., now blind, flees, along with his cohorts, to Italy where he will be a professor at the University of Siena. When all of this takes place is difficult to determine, though we are told that, at some point during these forty days, a French philosopher and mathematician named Descartes has recently died (that date would be 1650). Written in a style that is utterly invented, authentic, and arched, and transpiring in an atmosphere of eeriness that would make Lovecraft envious, Free City introduces a very interesting first novelist. [John O’Brien]