The Volcano by Venero Armanno: book review

The Volcano (2001) is the sixth novel by Venero Armanno, an Australian born author of Sicilian heritage.  

The novel commences with a reflection of Emilio Aquila’s life, from 1943 in Sicily when, at fifteen years of age, he was kicked and hospitalized by his family’s donkey. After the kick in the head he has violent inclinations. Living on a farm in the shadow of the Etna volcano, with its rumbling and roiling, smoke and fire, he is drawn to the mountain—not repulsed by it, or afraid of it. He runs away from home six months later, taking only the donkey, to live in the labyrinthine caves on the slopes of Mt. Etna. Years later, in the 1950s, he has two sea voyage tickets which took him “five years of blood to buy.” And so he arrives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife Desideria (who soon leaves him), as a man with a shady past and a secretive life.

Emilio, now in his seventies, lives in a groundsman’s cottage on the Queensland property of a Vietnamese doctor. Dr. Thach Yen-Khe, his wife Elizabeth, and two daughters, Laura and Symantha, live in a house further up the hill. When their marriage breaks down, Elizabeth demands the departure of both Thach and Emilio. The news brings back Emilio’s past to haunt him. He finds himself, one evening, with an axe in his hand.

Mary Aquila, undertaking a university-level writing course, receives a telephone call informing her that “one of your relatives has got himself in trouble.” The front page of the local newspaper reports that two male intruders entered the home of two eighty-year-old women—one is killed with a hammer and the other is badly beaten. When the police arrive, Emilio is swinging an axe handle at the intruders. Emilio is a hero, but is hospitalized with head and eye wounds.

Mary Aquila had never heard of Emilio; neither had her grandmother. Mary finds him in hospital, and meets the newly rejected Dr. Thach Yen-Khe. Mary cares for them both, nursing Emilio back to health in her own home. As a writing student completing her thesis, she decides to document Emilio’s history into a story. Dr. Thach lets Mary use an office in his new home—some nights she stays with her new lover, and some nights she returns to her home to attend to Emilio.

Emilio’s true story unfolds. The novel is his explanation, his “defense” for the way he was when he arrived in Australia—“hopeful and scared, and optimistic and suspicious”—and “the self-justification of an old man."

The Volcano is a mammoth book of weight-lifting proportions—but also of magnificent scope, detail, and emotion. More than a story about escaping the past, and more than a story about assimilation into a new country, it is also a story of the memories, events, people, environment, and lifestyle that repeat, defeat, and complete a person. But, like a volcanic eruption and twenty years of lava, ash and fallout that creates perfect conditions for fruit and vegetables, “the catastrophe of one generation is the blessing of the next.”