After Hannibal

Barry Unsworth, who lives in Umbria, has chosen to set his latest novel, After Hannibal, among the wandering lanes and ancient fields he knows well. His cast of characters is a diverse bunch that includes a homosexual couple named Fabio and Arturo; a mentally unstable German named Ritter; the Greens, an American couple; the morose Italian historian Monti; and the Chapmans, a dull British couple at war with a local family, the Checchettis, over maintenance of a wall that fronts the country lane they both share. Unsworth uses geographical propinquity to link them all together and then throws in another common bond as well: the crafty lawyer Mancini, whom almost all have cause to consult at one time or another during the course of the novel.

Unsworth's darkly comic novel of greed, perfidy, and deceit occupies a landscape all too familiar with such things; Umbria is, after all, the place where Carthaginian invaders under Hannibal ambushed and slaughtered an entire Roman legion. Tactics have changed since the days of Hannibal, but the Umbria of After Hannibal is still a treacherous locale.