Niccolò Ammaniti's latest novel "Come Dio comanda" (Mondadori, pp 495, euro 19.00), is centred around a father and son, Rino and Cristiano. The first "Looked kind of Chinese. He was thirty six years and gave the impression of being 50. In recent years he had put on a few stone" - a very shady character, a Nazi and racist at heart, yet with a strong bond of affection with his son who on the other hand - "slight, tall for thirteen, with thin wrists and ankles, long, bony hands and size 11 feet" - is well aware that his father is a "a drunkard, violent, a good for nothing", yet he also knows that he is only person he can truly rely on. Together with a couple of very dubious mates of his, Quattro Formaggi and Danilo, Rino decides to carry out a very bizarre heist, by literally ripping a cash machine out of a wall using a tractor. But on the night of the job a storm rages, and only Danilo shows at the appointed time; in the meantime, a young girl caught in a storm as she is returning home on her moped, is raped and massacred in a wood.
Initially pitched on an almost grotesque plane, as the pages progress "Come Dio comanda" gradually shifts into a tragic mode: although in this instance the tone is no longer the extremely realistic one of the previous "Io non ho paura", but is more in tune with the overblown and high-voltage energy of the short story collection "Fango", with emphatic passages that seem to fall halfway between hyper-realism and almost comic-book material ("He'd landed on top of the body and under the bicycle. His head resting among the barbecue leftovers with a Peroni beer label stuck to his cheek"). Beyond the plot itself, Ammaniti paints a picture of a town fraught with vulgarity and consumer baseness: the men dye their hair and women wear fashion spectacles, go on holiday in Valtur villages or to the "Coral Bay" in Sharm El Sheikh, buy their mobiles from "Cellulandia" and shop at the "Quattro camini" shopping centre. On the fringes, we get glimpses of the misery of those who haven't made the grade, depicted however without indulging in any form of ready sympathy: the seemingly unconscious ruthlessness of the poor then bursts forth - as we had already seen in "Io non ho paura" - in a most devastating and unpredictable fashion, leaving little room for any form of justification (so it comes as no surprise that the only positive character is an aging paediatrician, who looks after his little patients as if each one were his own child). An ambitious novel that perhaps falls short of the mark in places - particularly in terms of language, where Ammaniti's choice of words seems oddly lacking in scope and invention - "Come Dio comanda" is undoubtedly capable of holding the reader's attention throughout and provides a good deal of honest entertainment but we don't feel it lives up to the author's true potential.

Francesco Troiano