This was our Flora & Fauna ‘V’ book for Book Group discussion last month.
It’s the story of a rich American family, the Lingates, who return to holiday at the same villa on the Italian island of Capri off the Sorrento peninsula every year. This is in spite of the tragedy that happened back in 1992, when Sarah, wife of Richard Lingate went missing, and later when a body was found, declared dead. The two brothers, Marcus and Richard were cleared of any involvement.
The Lingate brothers’ fortune came from their late father’s oil company, Marcus is an investor in new tech now, and the younger Richard an Arts philanthropist. Marcus is married to Naomi, who sees life through an alcoholic, drugged haze, or so they’d have us believe. Richard has a daughter, Helen, who is the key character in the novel, as the novel starts she comments:
Money is my phantom limb, it was part of my body once. I know this because I feel its loss like an ambient current that runs up my spine, an occasional, sudden shock. Money is metabolic, a universal part of our constitution. Lorna taught me that.
Lorna is Marcus’s personal assistant. Normally, staff wouldn’t travel with the family, but as Lorna is ‘friends’ with Helen, Marcus invited her onto the jet, but she has still arranged everything! Only this year, there is a surprise waiting for Helen – a box containing the jeweled snake necklace that Sarah had worn when she disappeared. Yet more intrigue surrounds the play that Sarah had just finished when she died, but my lips are sealed.
The action alternates between three timelines and narrators. There’s 1992 when Sarah disappeared, but the present is divided in two between Helen ‘now’ and Lorna. Lorna’s chapters being titled ’36 hours until Lorna’s disappearance’ and so on with decreasing hours. So we know Lorna will disappear almost right from the start. We soon realise that Helen is plotting her escape from her claustrophobic family who seek to control her life just too much, with Lorna’s help. Presumably, something will go wrong? Or will echoes of Sarah’s murder get in the way? Or both?
This family is toxic – with Marcus reminding us of Succession’s dominant son, Kendall Roy, Richard being very much the second in line. The Lingates are the sort of family that take a yacht to a restaurant, recalling Richard Roper’s glamorous way of life in The Night Manager’s first season. Others in our group mentioned The White Lotus (which I’ve not seen, beyond the squirm-making scene in the very first episode which frankly put me off totally!) However, they weren’t quite awful enough to make us care quite enough about some of them. We also had some reservations that the major twist, revealed near the end, stretched credulity a little.
That said, our group all loved the setting. I visited Capri on a day trip back in 2007, and made the trek up the hill to the Villa Jovis, Tiberius’ home there, where he flung people over a sheer drop to dispose of them. Much of the 1992 action in The Vipers took place around it. The author captured the east side of the island brilliantly, from the bustle of the marina and the gloss of the high-end shops in Capri town, to the car-free quiet streets fanning up the hill. (Like me, the novel doesn’t travel west to the larger hilltop town of Ana-Capri with its chairlift – the Romans took priority!)
We all agreed that this was a good, if not outstanding read, We loathed the characters, but loved the setting.
Source: Own copy. Bantam hardback, 2025, 323 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.
I really struggle with art/media that’s about very wealthy people, and even more so when one of them narrates – and I’ve wondered why for a while. My tentative conclusion is that I simply don’t believe in their interiority enough. If, as Helen says, money is metabolic, it seems to render the extremely wealthy unreal to me, like they’re not actually people. (Exceptions are usually people who haven’t inherited money; *their* interiority seems to be capable of more conflict and interest.)
Oh, I agree. You put it so well.