Dark Is the Morning

LoveReading Says

An enthralling story of a young man’s descent into a dark mire of jealousy, Rupert Thomson’s Dark is the Morning sees lost soul Gino return to his family home in Italy’s Abruzzo region: “Caracciolo, where I had been born and raised. I would die there too, if I wasn’t careful”.

So far, so ominous, and then Gino’s father suggests it’s time for him to settle down. Why not try to pick things up with Franca, his childhood sweetheart? So, Gino finds Franca and their relationship is quick to blossom. They move in together and marry, and Franca gives birth to Elio, a baby boy whose extraordinary beauty (“there’s nothing about him that isn’t exquisite.

It’s unbelievable. It’s almost shocking”) draws people from far and wide, as if “setting eyes on him would amount to a kind of blessing”. At the same time, Gino’s jealousy of Franca’s former lover overcomes him, and he’s consumed by “the creeping, almost morbid sensation” that Elio has nothing to do with him. 

Thomson’s writing casts an almost otherworldly spell; the writing is lucid, and laced with a sense of foreboding through dreams that poison Gino’s waking state, leaving him “feeling that terrible events awaited”. This sense of menace is made all the more potent by an idyllic evocation of the couple’s early carefree romance (“lying naked on a blanket after making love, the kitchen window and the door wide open”), and its mythological scope, such as when Franca and Gino visit a ruined temple to seek the blessing of Diana, who “wasn’t just the goddess of the hunt.

She was the goddess of childbirth as well”. Then there’s Gino’s feverish descent into paranoid jealousy, and the shocking tragedy that comes in its wake. 

Teeming with tension. Dark is the Morning represents literary fiction at its most page-turningly thrilling, and poignant.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About Dark Is the Morning

Sometimes love isn't where you belongGino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside. Franca soon gives birth to a son so handsome that people come from miles around to see him - but his sheer beauty causes Gino to doubt that he is truly the boy's father.Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca's lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic effects on those around him.

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