In the Name of the Family

Sarah Dunant

Virago, £16.99

Review by David Robinson

BORINGLY, historians point out that the Borgias weren’t actually that bad, and that they mainly get such a bad rap because they were foreigners and only in power for a short time before their enemies took over.

Yet if you think that spoils their story, you haven’t read Sarah Dunant. For the last 14 years, her historical fiction has been coming close to doing for Renaissance Italy what Hilary Mantel has done for Tudor England.

So deeply does she burrow into the past that her readers are able to imagine it almost as clearly as if it were the present, reinvesting it with that knife-edge uncertainty with which we ourselves imagine the future.

How does she do that when writing about historical figures we might feel as though we half-know already from the “black legend” of the Borgias?

The first thing she does is to show how their lives affected each other’s. So here, in this sequel to 2013’s Blood and Beauty, is Cesare Borgia, impressing Machiavelli as the very model of the modern double-dealer.

As he rampages through the Romagna, his sister Lucrezia is on her way to her third marriage, this time into the powerful d’Este family in Ferrara.

In Rome, supervising everything, their doting father, Rodrigo, now Pope Alexander XII, is using both of them to fashion a lasting legacy of familial power.

One lost battle, one bust alliance, one courtier’s plot, one barren marriage, and this tripartite enterprise could come spectacularly unstuck.

Sometimes – as with Cesare Borgia’s attack on Urbino in 1502 – the plotting worked dazzlingly well. That was the message that Machiavelli took away from his meetings with “the dark prince” at any rate: master the rules of realpolitik, and everything else would follow.

Yet Dunant’s novel emphasises the precise opposite – how unpredictable life was back then. Quite apart from almost incessant warfare, summer fevers would routinely cut a swathe through the population, and childbirth and the pox – both scarily described – account for many more.

Time presses that bit more intensely as a result: on Alexander VI, determined not to die before he can stitch up the succession at the Vatican; on Cesare, desperately fighting the syphilis that has already ravaged his face so badly that he often wears a mask; and on Lucrezia, who has to get pregnant fast and seal the dynastic deal with the d’Estes.

This is Dunant’s fifth Renaissance novel, and like the rest sparkles with the kind of details that fires the imagination. After Lucrezia gives birth to a premature still-born baby, she is taken to recover to a Ferrara convent not too dissimilar to the one where Dunant set her 2009 novel Sacred Hearts and briefly lived while doing research.

Yet at no stage does that research ever look like an annexe to the story instead of something that is firmly part of it. Although she might use the languages of medieval medical care, courtly love or diplomacy, for example, it’s not done purely for show so much as to take the reader deeper into the mindset of her characters.

At such times, like the very best historical fiction, In the Name of the Family seems to be written from within the past rather than outside it.

I’ll give you an example. Earlier, I referred to Cesare Borgia’s triumph of taking Urbino without a fight. When Machiavelli reaches the now-conquered city, he sees a load of empty carts and mules lined up, and can’t work out whether they are there to bring provisions or to carry away loot. Even this great political commentator hasn’t got a clue. And that, you can’t help thinking, is exactly as it would have been.

Dunant has no time for the “black legend” of the Borgias. Her Lucrezia isn’t a poisoner, nor are her brother and father guilty of incest with her. But we read Dunant’s novel and we see exactly why Machiavelli was fascinated by them.

They may not have been quite as bad as they were subsequently painted, and perhaps indeed their contemporaries were no better. But even a novel that sets out to clear their name shows them to be just as intriguing – in every sense – as ever.