The Celtic leopard: welcome to the age of 'tranformismo'

CULTURE SHOCKDURING THAT brief moment last year when the British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was still popular, he appeared on Desert Island Discs. His choice of a book to bring with him seemed, in my mind at least, to mark him as a peculiarly astute politician. He chose a short novel, written by a down-at-heel Italian aristocrat just before his death from lung cancer in 1957. The novel is Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's The Leopard,and it has good claims to be the best political novel ever written.

If you haven't read it and you're wondering how so much ferment in Ireland can have produced, in yesterday's election, such a minor shift in the ruling class, The Leopardis for you. As well as being superbly written, elegantly funny and immediately engaging, it is a masterclass in how ruling classes work. One wonders if, in choosing it, Clegg was being disingenuous or sending out a subtle message that with a new government everything would change and nothing would change.

The Leopardis one of the great improbables of 20th-century art. In general, there was no real likelihood that a member of the decayed Italian aristocracy, so utterly irrelevant by the 1950s, would have something brilliant to say about politics and power. And in particular, there was even less chance that it would be said by this particular clapped-out aristo.

The Tomasis claimed descent from the Byzantine emperors but carved out their fiefdom in 16th century, becoming dukes of Palma and princes of Lampedusa. (They sold the island of Lampedusa to the King of Naples in the 19th century.) By the time Giuseppe was born in 1896, they were dwindling away. He seemed to embody that decline, spending most of his life doing nothing much.

When he started writing The Leopardin 1955, the Prince of Lampedusa was a mockery of his own grand title. He was childless, impoverished, soon to become terminally ill and the last of the family's great heirlooms, the Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo, had been destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during the war. He wrote his short book. It was rejected. He rewrote it. It was rejected again. He died.

The Leopardwas published in 1958 to immediate acclaim in Italy but it quickly came under attack, especially from the literary left, who denounced it as an attack on the very idea of political progress. But it was then championed by one of Europe's leading Marxist intellectuals, Louis Aragon, who recognised it for what it is: a mercilessly unsentimental depiction of the way ruling classes both shift and endure.

The key scene in the book comes early on and it is the crispest description there is of the way conservative forces can react intelligently to change.

It is May 1860, and the revolutionary armies of Garibaldi and the Italian Risorgimento are about to attack Sicily. The prince, Salina, is a stalwart of the King of Naples – we have just been privy to his visit to court. As he shaving in his palazzo, he is visited by his roguish nephew Tancredi, whose roguish spirit he admires. Tancredi announces that he is off to join the rebels.

The prince objects that a man of Tancredi’s aristocratic blood should be “with us, for the King”. Tancredi, suddenly serious, counters: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they will foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?” The prince gets the point: “Tancredi will go a long way: he’d always thought so.”

Tancredi does indeed go far. He marries a daughter of the rising bourgeoisie who brings him the money he needs for his political career. When we glimpse him 23 years on: “He was a deputy, had been promised the Legation in Lisbon, knew many a secret and savoury tale.” In a coda set in 1910, we learn that Tancredi has been Italian minister in Vienna and is remembered as “one of the purest heroes of our Risorgimento”. Things have changed utterly and yet stayed as they are.

This makes The Leopardsound heavy and programmatic, but its greatness lies in Tomasi de Lampedusa's lightness of touch. There is no rancour, no snobbery, no nostalgia, no hauteur, no mourning for the grand aristocracy. There is, rather, an Olympian detachment that makes the book at once ruthless in its laying bare of motives and manoeuvres – of the aristocracy, the church and the bourgeoisie – and deliciously comic.

Those who attacked The Leopardas fatalistic were not wrong: it suggests change is more illusory than real. But then, Sicily has done little since the 1950s to contradict Lampedusa's fatalism. And his pessimism is not archaic – it is very much of a piece with the broader mood of 1950s European literature. Lampedusa subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reminds us that this is not a historical novel, but a novel about history. When the prince claims that those who will take the place of his aristocracy will be "the little jackals, hyenas", the reference to Mussolini is clear. And when Lampedusa intrudes to tell us the prince's palazzo will be destroyed in 1943 by "a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" he is ensuring that we will not sink sleepily into the sumptuous world of 19th-century decadence.

The Italians have a word, invented I think by Antonio Gramsci, for the phenomenon The Leopardso wonderfully unfolds: transformismo. It suggests a kind of pseudo-transformation in which political conflicts are resolved by the absorption of oppositional forces into the establishment.

Things seem to have changed, but they are essentially the same.

Politically, Ireland seems to be at a moment of transformismo. The most enjoyable way to get to grips with it is to read The Leopard.