Blame and shame, wearing infinite shades of gray

Books

Alibi,

by Joseph Kanon.

Henry Holt and Company.

406 pages. $26.

One never comes away from a Joseph Kanon novel without feeling a little travel weary, and that is a compliment. From Los Alamos to Berlin, and now Venice in his latest and fourth novel, Alibi, Kanon offers such vivid sensory detail that a reader emerges as steeped in atmospherics as a seasoned diplomat with a passport full of visa stamps. You feel initiated, as if you've been let in on some dark and well-kept secrets from some of the 20th century's most pivotal moments.

Yet, no matter where he takes you on the globe, Kanon's most well-traveled ground is the landscape of guilt. As wars come and go, be they hot or cold, who can account for his actions and still claim purity? Not the postwar Berliners of The Good German, or the Cold Warriors of The Prodigal Spy. And it isn't hard to see what the bomb-making physicists of his first novel, Los Alamos had to answer for.

But in Alibi, despite its setting in postwar Venice, the most benignly beautiful of all Kanon's locales, the landscape of guilt is craggier and more perilous than ever. That's because this time everyone has crimes to answer for, even Adam Miller, the young American army officer who has just arrived from occupied Germany to live with his ex-pat mom. He is fresh off a Nazi-hunting posting that has left him all too attuned to the ways people try to rationalize beastly crimes, or beastly failures to intervene.

Kanon's most masterful stroke is his creation of Claudia Grassini as Adam's love interest. She is a Venetian Jew who would seem to have every reason to lash out at others, or to accuse from a position of purity. Yet, even she has much to answer for. Apart from the usual case of survivor's guilt -- she made it out alive from a German concentration camp, even as her father and most of her neighbors perished -- there are lingering questions over what Claudia was willing to do to survive.

Adam's widowed mother has taken up with Gianni Maglione, a surgeon and a marginally aristocratic old scion who may or may not be wealthy. Adam, having spent the past year sniffing around for guilty associations and cover-ups, can't help but mistrust Gianni, especially once he learns that the old fellow knew his mom well before the war, when she was still happily married to dear old dad. When Claudia then accuses Gianni of betraying her father to the Nazis, that seals the deal for Adam, and he begins using his various Army connections to poke around in Gianni's immediate past.

This seems to establish the novel's trajectory -- a fairly conventional tale of an investigator seeking justice on behalf of his lover. But early on in Alibi, events take a macabre and violent turn. And even though the violence is somewhat accidental, from then on, Adam and Claudia must deceive mightily to hide their misdeeds and justify their actions. From then on, Kanon not only maintains a taut level of suspense, he also executes a neat pirouette in which the book's two supposed innocents have the freshest blood to wash from their hands.

For readers accustomed to rooting unconditionally for the protagonist, it can be an uneasy experience. And every time some other character seems to offer a refuge of spotlessness, or relative integrity, a new or old stain emerges to steer us away -- collaboration, assassination, profiteering, or the general callousness of combat. In Kanon's eclectic cast of policemen, soldiers, revolutionaries and ex-pat socialites, no one is spared the deep, dark smudges offered by war and its aftermath.

That can get oppressive at times. Once Kanon begins ratcheting up the tension and the stakes of survival, he offers little relief. Maybe that's why he chose Venice for his setting. The city's ageless beauty and the surreal wonders of its watery boulevards make for a diverting backdrop. When Adam and Claudia take their leave from reality for a night of grand opera at La Fenice, we are relieved to do the same. Kanon never stints on offering just the right amount of color and loving detail. You can smell the briny sump of the canals as easily as the steam from the morning cappuccino. Perhaps he is telling us that, of all the characters, Venice stands alone as blameless, an amoral witness concerned only with tide and time. But even his prettiest atmospherics are only a thin coating of makeup on a morality tale about the varying shades of human ugliness.

Dan Fesperman is a Sun reporter and author. His most recent novel is The Warlord's Son.