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Chimera
First published in 1989 Chimera was Simon Mawer’s first novel. Mawer is renowned as one of today's most talented writers of historical spy fiction.
The fabulous Chimera - mythic monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent - is more that just an Etruscan bronze discovered by archaeologist David Hewison. It lurks in the background of this novel as a symbol of the man part Italian, part English, an explorer of the past who is haunted by his own past when he parachuted into wartime Italy as an SOE agent.
Yet this is not just a war story.
It is within the present, in the complex little world of an archaeological dig in central Italy, that the past is seen to work - the old conflicts of the Hewison family and the tragedies of wartime Italy surfacing in the present to precipitate a disturbing climax.
The fabulous Chimera - mythic monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent - is more that just an Etruscan bronze discovered by archaeologist David Hewison. It lurks in the background of this novel as a symbol of the man part Italian, part English, an explorer of the past who is haunted by his own past when he parachuted into wartime Italy as an SOE agent.
Yet this is not just a war story.
It is within the present, in the complex little world of an archaeological dig in central Italy, that the past is seen to work - the old conflicts of the Hewison family and the tragedies of wartime Italy surfacing in the present to precipitate a disturbing climax.
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Published September 26, 2019
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Simon Mawer
39 books341 followersSimon Mawer was a British author who lived in Italy.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 14, 2025
From the jacket flyleaf of the 1989 hardback edition from Hamish Hamilton:
"The fabulous Chimera - mythic monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent - is more than just an Etruscan bronze discovered by archaeologist David Hewison. It lurks in the background of this novel as a symbol of the man himself: part Italian, part English, an explorer of the past who is haunted by his own past when he parachuted into wartime Italy as an SOE agent. Estranged from his wealthy family, he is still dependent on the family fortune to finance his life's work, a major excavsation in Central Italy; but, when his nephew Anthony Lessing visits the dig, Hewison's war career is exposed as remorselessly as he himself has revealed the life of the ancient Etruscans: there is the old walled village from which his partisan group operated in 1943, the disaster which befell the nearby town of Vetrano at the hands of German troops, and above everything his compromising relationship with Clara Alessio, the wife of a Fascist leader.
"Yet this is not a war story. It is within the present, in the complex little world of the Villa Rasenna where the archaeologists live, that the past is seen to work. And it is Lessing, falling in love with Hewison's wife and abandoning his own work in London, who discovers that to explore the past is
is to become part of it. The old conflicts of the Hewison family and the tragedies of wartime Italy both surface in the present to precipitate a disturbing climax to this novel."
[Simon Mawer died in early 2025 and GR has no information on him I refer you to obituaries which appeared in The Daily Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituarie... and a 2010 interview in The Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...]
Simon Mawer is an author whose novels have attracted awards, even a Booker nomination, and praise from professional and GR reviewers in abundance so why have I shelved this, his first novel, as 'bad-disappointing'? because it is and the faults of this novel are there in later novels like 'The Fall'. I should admit that when I began reading the novel I wondered why it had never been reissued (it has been on Kindle) but then I wondered how it had ever been published never mind won a serious literary UK award for a first novel. Probably because Mawer is a very good writer but when you look beyond the smoke and mirrors there is a definite vacuity at the centre of not simply this novel but others. Mawer is very good at the literary conjuring tricks that obfuscate plot lines into sudden reveals. The problem is that, like in 'The Fall', the big 'secret' is almost impossible to miss from very early in the novel (I am being vague I don't believe in spoilers or hiding spoilers anything that follows is not a giveaway because the plot lines I am going to discuss are actually nothing to do with the real plot of the novel).
David Hewison the Anglo-Italian OSS operative at the core of the novel is incredibly undeveloped or explored as a character. During WWII he led a partisan band in a remote Italian village and the problems of how the partisans activities impacted on others is explored - it is a story more often heard of in France or the Balkans but was very true of Italy. Although the publishers insist this is not a 'war novel' that is a somewhat disingenuous statement. It is not only about war but the war seems to have pivotal in forming the post-war David Hewison his nephew Anthony Lessing meets.
What is more curious is how little the emotional motivations of David Hewison are explored. It is made plain that he desired and had an affair with Clara Alessio marries her daughter but out of the blue we learn that during the war, before seducing Mrs Alessio he was porking her 15 year old son (the same age he would later deflower his sister). Was he just sexually incontinent? When did he stop with the son and concentrate on the mother? did the son feel jealous? annoyed? None of these questions is explored. It appears the 'queer/gay' story is just a plot device to add a frisson of the unexpected or naughty to the tale. That he also dropped a similar unexplored 'queer/gay' plot device into 'The Fall' confirms this.
But a man who beds the son, the mother and daughter the same family needs some development to understand, even if it is only that he has a goatish priapic lust that can satisfy itself anywhere, there is no indication that Mawer was influenced by Pasolini's 'Theorem' but one can't help wondering.
I am sure I read in another review of Mawer book on GR that he seems to find it inevitable that all his characters will have sex. Maybe that is all behind his belated and unexplored 'queer/gay' subplots and there is no intention to use or ignore anyone. It's just sex. Well that doesn't really hold up with the rest of the novel but to discuss that would involve spoilers.
"The fabulous Chimera - mythic monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent - is more than just an Etruscan bronze discovered by archaeologist David Hewison. It lurks in the background of this novel as a symbol of the man himself: part Italian, part English, an explorer of the past who is haunted by his own past when he parachuted into wartime Italy as an SOE agent. Estranged from his wealthy family, he is still dependent on the family fortune to finance his life's work, a major excavsation in Central Italy; but, when his nephew Anthony Lessing visits the dig, Hewison's war career is exposed as remorselessly as he himself has revealed the life of the ancient Etruscans: there is the old walled village from which his partisan group operated in 1943, the disaster which befell the nearby town of Vetrano at the hands of German troops, and above everything his compromising relationship with Clara Alessio, the wife of a Fascist leader.
"Yet this is not a war story. It is within the present, in the complex little world of the Villa Rasenna where the archaeologists live, that the past is seen to work. And it is Lessing, falling in love with Hewison's wife and abandoning his own work in London, who discovers that to explore the past is
is to become part of it. The old conflicts of the Hewison family and the tragedies of wartime Italy both surface in the present to precipitate a disturbing climax to this novel."
[Simon Mawer died in early 2025 and GR has no information on him I refer you to obituaries which appeared in The Daily Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituarie... and a 2010 interview in The Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...]
Simon Mawer is an author whose novels have attracted awards, even a Booker nomination, and praise from professional and GR reviewers in abundance so why have I shelved this, his first novel, as 'bad-disappointing'? because it is and the faults of this novel are there in later novels like 'The Fall'. I should admit that when I began reading the novel I wondered why it had never been reissued (it has been on Kindle) but then I wondered how it had ever been published never mind won a serious literary UK award for a first novel. Probably because Mawer is a very good writer but when you look beyond the smoke and mirrors there is a definite vacuity at the centre of not simply this novel but others. Mawer is very good at the literary conjuring tricks that obfuscate plot lines into sudden reveals. The problem is that, like in 'The Fall', the big 'secret' is almost impossible to miss from very early in the novel (I am being vague I don't believe in spoilers or hiding spoilers anything that follows is not a giveaway because the plot lines I am going to discuss are actually nothing to do with the real plot of the novel).
David Hewison the Anglo-Italian OSS operative at the core of the novel is incredibly undeveloped or explored as a character. During WWII he led a partisan band in a remote Italian village and the problems of how the partisans activities impacted on others is explored - it is a story more often heard of in France or the Balkans but was very true of Italy. Although the publishers insist this is not a 'war novel' that is a somewhat disingenuous statement. It is not only about war but the war seems to have pivotal in forming the post-war David Hewison his nephew Anthony Lessing meets.
What is more curious is how little the emotional motivations of David Hewison are explored. It is made plain that he desired and had an affair with Clara Alessio marries her daughter but out of the blue we learn that during the war, before seducing Mrs Alessio he was porking her 15 year old son (the same age he would later deflower his sister). Was he just sexually incontinent? When did he stop with the son and concentrate on the mother? did the son feel jealous? annoyed? None of these questions is explored. It appears the 'queer/gay' story is just a plot device to add a frisson of the unexpected or naughty to the tale. That he also dropped a similar unexplored 'queer/gay' plot device into 'The Fall' confirms this.
But a man who beds the son, the mother and daughter the same family needs some development to understand, even if it is only that he has a goatish priapic lust that can satisfy itself anywhere, there is no indication that Mawer was influenced by Pasolini's 'Theorem' but one can't help wondering.
I am sure I read in another review of Mawer book on GR that he seems to find it inevitable that all his characters will have sex. Maybe that is all behind his belated and unexplored 'queer/gay' subplots and there is no intention to use or ignore anyone. It's just sex. Well that doesn't really hold up with the rest of the novel but to discuss that would involve spoilers.
March 7, 2022
This is a hard one to rate...
The novel follows two threads: the inscrutable David Hewison, part of some kind of British advanced military division (SOE, I hadn't heard of it before), as he parachutes into WWII Italy and helps the local partisans fight fascists and Germans. The second thread is set in the late 1980's and follows David's nephew, Antony Lessing, after recently separating from his wife as he decides to visit his uncle in Italy, who has become a somewhat renowned archaeologist, unearthing an Etruscan city near where he operated during the war.
The backdrop to the novel is that the Hewison family runs a global pharmaceutical company, where every family member lives quite a privileged upbringing, but is also expected to work for the company. David Hewison left the company at some unspecified point and hasn't talked to anyone apart from legal matters for decades, until Antony turns up.
The set up, as described above, has some great potential, but the problem is that the novel doesn't really go anywhere. A lot of stuff happens, and there is almost continuous dialogue, but it doesn't really progress the plot or characters more than what I have outlined above. Nothing grabbed me or engaged me to care about the characters or what happened to them. What is interesting to me is that I absolutely adore Iain Banks novels that do exactly the same thing - nothing really happening. Perhaps this difference is due to Banks diving into the British/Scottish psyche, which is my background, whereas Mawer goes into the Italian, which is alien to me and simply didn't engage me in the same way..?
Interestingly the novel was released in 1989 but seems to have barely been read, there's one review on Amazon and 7 ratings in Goodreads, but in 2019 it was released as an audiobook, which is the format in which I consumed it.
The novel follows two threads: the inscrutable David Hewison, part of some kind of British advanced military division (SOE, I hadn't heard of it before), as he parachutes into WWII Italy and helps the local partisans fight fascists and Germans. The second thread is set in the late 1980's and follows David's nephew, Antony Lessing, after recently separating from his wife as he decides to visit his uncle in Italy, who has become a somewhat renowned archaeologist, unearthing an Etruscan city near where he operated during the war.
The backdrop to the novel is that the Hewison family runs a global pharmaceutical company, where every family member lives quite a privileged upbringing, but is also expected to work for the company. David Hewison left the company at some unspecified point and hasn't talked to anyone apart from legal matters for decades, until Antony turns up.
The set up, as described above, has some great potential, but the problem is that the novel doesn't really go anywhere. A lot of stuff happens, and there is almost continuous dialogue, but it doesn't really progress the plot or characters more than what I have outlined above. Nothing grabbed me or engaged me to care about the characters or what happened to them. What is interesting to me is that I absolutely adore Iain Banks novels that do exactly the same thing - nothing really happening. Perhaps this difference is due to Banks diving into the British/Scottish psyche, which is my background, whereas Mawer goes into the Italian, which is alien to me and simply didn't engage me in the same way..?
Interestingly the novel was released in 1989 but seems to have barely been read, there's one review on Amazon and 7 ratings in Goodreads, but in 2019 it was released as an audiobook, which is the format in which I consumed it.
October 7, 2024
What a slog! Nothing really happens yet there is so much dialogue throughout. Tiresome.
January 5, 2016
This is Mawer’s first novel and it is not as accomplished as some of his later ones. It is ambitious – set in Italy and linking the periods of the Etruscans, the second world war and the present day. Mawer lives and teaches in Italy and his love for the country and understanding of (and sometimes frustration with) its people and politics are evident. There are multiple relationships here – David (the English soldier parachuted into Italy to lead the resistance against the Germans and later an archaeologist), his nephew Anthony and the women they love – Clara (the wife of a Mussolini supporter) and Lara (later David’s wife). This is a multi-layered, absorbing story that doesn’t QUITE make it!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews