The Age of Doubt – Andrea Camilleri
After the masterpiece The Potter's Field (2008), by the fourteenth installment even a loyal reader of the Inspector Montalbano series set in Vigata, Sicily would expect their hero Salvo to start losing his luster. But this 2012 translation of L'età del dubbio is an entertaining whodunnit complete with international intrigue.
Camilleri details a complex case, cleverly scatters the clues and introduces curious personalities in the inspector's investigation into the killing of man whose corpse was found in a dinghy in Vigata’s harbor. Montalbano meets a young woman who’s in the Navy. She sends him into an adolescent tizzy. He spends the novel wondering if what he feels is a genuine emotion or a mere desire to recapture the sensational excitements of a sixteen-year-old kid. Or worse, just an ego boost that he still has appeal enough to attract a woman about half his age. Or worst, only as a hunter he wants to possess her and wield control over her emotions and behavior.
We constant readers of the series are not drawn so much by the development of action and intrigue but by the series hero Salvo Montalbano, tired, less eager, who dreams of his own funeral to which his long-time GF Livia doesn't even show up. Plus, as comic relief, to get out of doing paperwork, Montalbano tells his superior Lattes a crazy lie about the death of his non-existent son.
Montalbano is a masterfully drawn character. As he turns 58 years of age he becomes more interesting. Montalbano is dealing – not philosophically, with zero wisdom - with what scares any sensible male reader as he enters late middle-age and early old-age: losing mental sharpness and deteriorating health and throwing in the sponge in the bout against weight gain and wondering who’s going to have the brass to skip his funeral. His progress in the investigation is affected by these ructions of his soul, but that's fine since I like the blend of the stories of the cop and the middle-aged guy.
An exciting novel albeit not as much a master work as the previous one. It’s inspiring to remember that Camilleri was 83 years old when he wrote it. Incredible.
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