Altai by Wu Ming – review

The New Yorker once described Clive James as "a brilliant bunch of guys". Wu Ming actually are a brilliant bunch of guys: Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Riccardo Pedrini, a collective of Italian writers and self-styled cultural terrorists based in Bologna, who write novels together under the name Wu Ming, and who like to compare their working method to jazz improvisation, role-playing games and 1970s Dutch total football.

Their first novel, Q, written when they were a part of the now defunct Luther Blissett Project – named after the one-time Watford and England footballer who suffered racial abuse when playing for AC Milan – was published in Italy in 1999, and translated into English in 2003. One might have expected a bunch of cultural terrorists to produce a work of impenetrable self-conscious artspeak. Instead, Q was a massive, rollicking, readable historical novel set during the Reformation.

The group have since written more works of historical fiction, all with political intent, including 54, set in Europe and the US in the 1950s, and Manituana, set in the 18th century. In 2009 they returned to the rich, dark territory of the 1500s with the publication of Altai, now translated by Shaun Whiteside, one of the great literary translators. The book is, as they say, unputdownable.

One suspects that this has much to do with the writers' peculiar method. Working together, Wu Ming produce books that read almost as if they were serial publications, or computer games, or multi-authored US television sitcoms, consisting of hundreds of silky sequences carefully stitched together. Most chapters are just a few pages long and tend to end with a cliffhanger sentence so obvious, so thrilling and so bold that the authors might simply have typed "To be continued …" at appropriate intervals throughout. These addictive, teasing terminal lines act as useful plot interchanges. "He would tell the truth." "For a moment I stood on the spot. Then I got moving." "So it was that I abandoned Venice, sure that I would never see her again." "The men locked the door behind them, leaving me sitting on the floor." It's feuilleton fiction.

The story is narrated by Emanuele de Zante, a Venetian gentleman, spycatcher and torturer who is accused of being a spy himself. De Zante becomes a fugitive, rediscovers his Jewish identity and ends up travelling to Salonica and Constantinople, making love and falling in love along the way, being captured by dastardly traitors, escaping from them, and eventually working with Giuseppie Nasi ("The Damned. The Cursed One. The Devil in person. The Sultan's favourite Jew") to try to establish a Jewish homeland in Cyprus.

The pace is relentless, and what matters throughout is not so much the quality as the sheer quantity of historical data and description: it's a book distinguished by its density and its momentum. Take this, from the beginning of chapter 25, a typical scene-setting opening: "The midday sun erased the shadows from the dock at Scutari and scattered drops of gold in the puddles left by nighttime rain. The reflections dazzled the eye. It was hot, perhaps for the first time since I had come to the city, and the sea's bright hues spoke of summer. Men and goods crowded the big open space on the Bosphorus; products from between carts and holds, unloaded from the backs of stevedores and the humps of camels. Nothing seemed to stop for as long as a breath." That last sentence could be a Wu Ming stylistic manifesto.

Another Wu Ming trait is the use of historical fiction as a form of cultural protest. We sometimes forget that the historical novel, ironically, is essentially a form of experimental fiction – counter-factual, anti-realist, and anti the dull mid-range of our everyday experience. Using this apparently conventional form, Wu Ming are able to reinterpret and reconstruct reality according to their own aims and intentions. There are doubtless parallels, for example, between the despoiling, warring powers depicted in Altai and the rapacious nation states of today. But of course many of us would rather read about the adventures of a De Zante than think too hard about the nature of geopolitics. Wu Ming make it possible to do both.