Astronomical talent: Halley's Comet inspires a time-bending, heart-stopping tour de force.

Fabrizio's Return Mark Frutkin Knopf Canada 311 pages, hardcover ISBN: 0676977278

Whether recreating belle epoque France in Atmospheres Apollinaire, Marco Polo's travels in The Lion of Venice, the Tibet of a hundred years ago in Invading Tibet, or Spain's collapse into civil war in Slow Lightning, Mark Frutkin characteristically displays an astringently lyrical narrative talent, irradiated by a fascination with matters spiritual and artistic. His latest, highly schematic novel significantly and most entertainingly deepens his exploration of these issues, vigorously embodied in the life of Cremona, home to the greatest violin makers from the Amati to Guarneri and Stradivarius.

The novel nominally takes place in 1682, the year in which Edmund Halley observed the comet that bears his name, and in 1758, the year of its next appearance. On the first occasion, Padre Fabrizio Cambiati, priest, apothecary, painter and alchemist, watches its arrival from the top of the torrazzo, "the tallest tower in a city of a hundred towers," through a new-fangled telescope that turns everything upside down. Seventy-six years later, the Jesuit Michele Archenti, Promotor Fidei and devil's advocate, a man whose very job is to turn everything upside down, arrives to investigate Fabrizio's candidacy for sainthood.

Through the telescope, however, Fabrizio also witnesses Archenti's arrival, as well as people and events from the past and present, including a commedia dell'arte troupe setting up in the town square. Under the comet's influence, the world is one in which time is as the River Po, "always changing, always the same," sequential, elastic, circular, mutable yet static. It is a world of magic realism in which the intellectual, artistic and spiritual realms exist on the same plane as everyday material reality. Cocooned in these opening visions are Frutkin's themes of love, mutability, creation, ecstasy, immortality and, above all, man's relation to his universe. With considerable skill, humour and detail, Frutkin will ravel and unravel them through the interweaving of three narratives, those of Fabrizio, Archenti and the commedia's Pantalone.

Fabrizio--who will never come down from the tower--is a good man, loving and lovable, very much as human as divine, as much an alchemist and painter as a priest. His greatest ambition is to solve the mystery of the Philosopher's Stone in order to cure all mankind's afflictions, and he is not above buying an aphrodisiac from a commedia player to examine its elements. Some of this he gives to Niccolo, a violin maker, who uses it as a tincture to stain a new instrument. In a crucial episode, Fabrizio paints a mural in a convent garden of a young duchess posing as Saint Agata, accompanied by Niccolo playing ecstatically on his new violin, "listening to his own music as if from a great distance, as if the courtyard had expanded enormously." Fabrizio is not a professional painter nor the duchess a saint and the aphrodisiac is mountebank fare, but the passions aroused are at once both human and divine. From these materials flows a scene whose surpassing beauty and significance reverberate throughout the other two narratives.

Archenti's professional scepticism about the claims made on behalf of Fabrizio's sanctity--his divine humanity as it were--is compounded when he too begins to fall under the hypnotic spell of a young woman. Elettra is the great granddaughter and companion to Fabrizio's duchess, still living, or partly living, at the age of 95. In a world full of dark shadows, of constantly rolling fog and teeming rain suddenly converted into bright sunlight, time begins to loop around. As Fabrizio was a healer, so Archenti cures Elettra, first with a medicine sent from Rome, then with a less religious potion from Fabrizio's alchemical workshop. As Fabrizio was the duchess's confidant, Archenti becomes Elettra's tutor. The priest's emotions were poured into his portrait, the advocate's into increasingly erotic dreams full of images of melting and obliteration. Archenti's devotion to the faith and his destructive role as advocate are replaced by his submission to Elettra and the creative power of love. Alerted to the secret of Fabrizio's ancestry embedded in the duchess's portrait, Archenti makes a final discovery that completes his own particular renaissance. Fabrizio returns.

Meanwhile, the commedia plot blithely fuses the worlds of fantasy and conventional reality at every turn, the stock characters of Pantalone, Arlecchino et al. embodying elements of the novel's other characters in a narrative that is both on the stage and in the world, developing in time yet fixed in art. Starting and finishing in Cremona's piazza, a standard plot involving the ancient Pantalone's attempt to win the hand of a young woman conveys the characters to a literal Mantua. There lives the violin maker Ugo, in a palace "vast and exfoliating ... without limit and without egress," where exits continually disappear to be replaced by yet more rooms, engendered by the endless fear and sadness of Ugo's thoughts, from which he can emerge only with the help of others.

His sadness derives from his unsuccessful wooing of one of Elettra's forebears, who is now pent up in the palace of his mind, hideously aged like one of Swift's citizens of Laputa, trapped eternally in the hypnotic words of the poetry she reads. The hump-backed Ugo still sees her, as on a Keatsian urn, as the fair creature she was in her youth, and finally by an Icarian error, joins her in her immortal stasis. Pantalone, of course, must end as miserably as he always does, the violin he had commissioned from Ugo in order to seduce his beloved smashed beyond redemption.

Repeatedly invoked as an agent of insight and change (the meaning of Fabrizio's last name, Cambiati), it is the ever-returning but never-changing comet, "the head of a child bursting into the world with a white trailing cry ... a great idea shooting up a spine and into the heavens high above," that dominates this canvas as wide as the universe, a canvas to which Frutkin's cross-hatching of detail, metaphor and image gives a living and tangible density.

The opening and closing invocation of "Omero, awake!," the metaphor of finches fluttering urgently in the hearts of men, Fabrizio's inverted counterpart, Padre Attilio Bodini, a Hieronymite monk who paints a coded mural, and Ugo's glancing embodiment of characteristics of Niccolo, Archenti, Fabrizio and Omero (his dwarfish servant) are a few such devices. Ugo is also reflected in Rodrigo, a man whose life Fabrizio had saved and who functions as a confidant to both priest and advocate, travelling through the world with the skeleton of the brother he had murdered on his back, seeing images of the world turned upside down as if through a telescope.

Truth to tell, I feel that Frutkin rather over-eggs this particular pudding, his obsession with connecting up every available dot (or speck of comet dust) sometimes more academic than organic, just as I find his claim (in an endnote) that the novel's structure utilizes that illustrious classical proportion, the Golden Section, merely precious. But although Rodrigo is a bit of a preachy bore and some of the dialogue is under-par, especially at critical moments, this remains a work of rococo brilliance and vivid imagination, in which passages of heart-stopping beauty and power (never has the killing of a dog been more suddenly shocking) dissolve into an unfailingly gripping fable.

Graham Harley has taught in the English departments of Dartmouth College and the University of Toronto. Also an actor, he can be seen as Cyril in the acclaimed television series Slings and Arrows.