(Drivebycuriosity) - I just finished reading "Wolf on a String" by Benjamin Black (the pen name of William John Banville amazon). "Wolf" is one of the best books I read in the recent years and I enjoyed it very much.
The novel is set in Prague around the year 1600. The city was the capital of Bohemia and the seat of the court of Rudolf II, the emperor of Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so Prague was the center of the Western world. The story is told in first person by a young intellectual, who had just arrived from Würzburg (Germany). The protagonist gets drawn into a vortex of murder and intrigues at the imperial court (this is a spoiler free blog).
The novel combines history with a whodunit story. Black puts the reader on a trip back in time and immerses him into a bleak, cold & precarious world. Life was very fragile & hazardous then and the protagonist´s fate depends on the arbitrariness of the more powerful. The novel would be the perfect dystopian novel if it wouldn´t be set in the past, our real history.
I cared about the protagonist and indulged into Black`s style, his amusing descriptions of the Emperor, who was a troubled leader, the various persons at his court and his portrait of Prague. Who is predator and who is the prey? The author´s sharp psychological & analytical insights and his sarcastic remarks about sex, architecture, politics & more remind me of Vladimir Nabokov.
I was entertained and learned a lot about history. "Wolf on a String" is highly recommended.
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