Review: You'll be tempted to quit reading, don't
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 23, 2014
The Romantic movement was brought to an end by the death of Shelley and soon after Byron.  These guys were both self-indulgent and treated women like toliet paper, but left an indelible impression on their age.  The Strange Death of a Romantic deals with both the events surrounding the death of Shelley and a group of English tourist staying in run down villa in La Spezia.  One of the tourist was a newly graduated doctor named Guy Parrot.  As the book opens Dr. Parrot is back in La Spezia years later in the second World War.  The action goes back and forth between the present when the War was ending and the past in 1930.Mr. Williams draws the descriptive passages out to where you debate about stopping and when you are close to giving it a heave, presents you with another clue.  The cast includes Ambrose, a playwright who everyone assures Guy is  a genius, Lewis, a poet who always has a large bank note that causes him to prevail on others to pick up the tab for him.  The ladies include Lady Margot Davant and Lady Julia Sinclair.  Margot and Julia were both estranged from their husbands.  Margot had been married for her money and Julia's husband was rumored to be gay.  The Italians were under Mussolini and military preparations were under way.  They were joined by an English lady who worked as a medium and was under arrest for having her papers stolen.  The were a clever, ruthlessly intelligent bunch who made their own rules and were not much bothered by social convention.  They were not unlike the party of English tourists that included Shelley and Byron a hundred years earlier.This book is actually a post-modern who-dun-it.  None of these people are who they seem.  They have advanced sense of entitlement and no real regard for truth or right or wrong.  Madame Hecate puts it best when she describes a relative by pointing out what happens to a person who thinks they are dangerous when they find themselves up against someone who really is and realize they are not.