THREE FIRES
Denise Mina 
(Birlinn, £10)
 
Although principally known for her crime thrillers, Denise Mina has never been held back by the restrictions of genre. In 2021, she penned a novella on the murder of Mary, Queen of Scots’ secretary, David Rizzio, and has delved back into history once more for this short, punchy account of the life and death of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who basically ran Florence in the last decade of the 15th century and would pay the ultimate price for defying the Vatican.
Originally written for radio, and intended to emulate the voice of PG Wodehouse, Three Fires has been reworked for print publication but still retains a trace of that knowing, ironic tone as it neatly distils to its essence the story of a promising young man from Ferrara who was unlucky in love and rejected a medical career to embrace the monastic life.
 In what was generally considered a fairly laid-back order, Savonarola stood out as a fanatical puritan, railing against the corruption of the church. Eventually settling in Florence, he got the ruling Medicis exiled and rallied the poor to his side with demands for better representation and an end to corruption. 
Claiming to have had prophetic, apocalyptic visions, he promised a glorious future for Florence as the centre of a renewed, purified church, essential components of which were, unfortunately, the persecution of Jews and homosexuals and the repression of women. Given that Florence was not only beset with graft and injustice but happened to be one of the more liberal, cosmopolitan city-states of its time, not all of his edicts were universally popular, and as an agitator who challenged the Papacy his days were inevitably numbered. 
In a deftly nuanced book, Mina gives us a Savonarola who can be read as hero, anti-hero or villain, often all at once. We’re invited to identify with his idealism and moral outrage, sympathise as his offer of marriage is spurned in the most humiliating way and pity the indignity and cruelty of his death. But there’s no getting past his toxic prejudices, the corrosive effect of his fanaticism or his inability to make a real human connection with the people who flock to his side. Savonarola is all ideology, with little discernible capacity for compassion or empathy.
 Mina’s conclusion that “This world is the aftermath of Girolamo Savonarola” is hard to argue with. Today’s readers will find both the friar and 15th-century Florence shockingly contemporary. That Savonarola, a dismal public speaker at first, spent six years honing his presentational skills before making his big move strikes a chord in today’s media-driven world. As does the fact he urged his followers to reject rationalism, or even the evidence of their own eyes, if it clashed with scripture, and preached theocracy as the solution to humanity’s problems. 
He amassed followers by raging against the financial sector, while demonising Jews and homosexuals and clamping down on women’s freedoms – using rhetorical techniques adopted by the populists and demagogues currently steering political discourse. One of the factions in a divided Florence was even named the Proud Boys. And as if those contemporary parallels weren’t enough, Mina presses the point home by entitling the chapter in which young Girolamo is spurned by his intended bride “An Incel Mishearing”. Three Fires is a brisk, pointed and eminently readable account that examines the virtues and failings of a remarkable individual, and helps us see our own world in relation to the late Middle Ages in a way that feels bracingly relevant and alive.