Il-Prinċep tal-Birgu (The Prince of Vittoriosa)
by Carmel Mallia, published by BDL, 2020.
Carmel Mallia is an outstanding poet, a very prolific novelist and a member of the Esperanto Academy. His novels are invariably built on a background of highly colourful scenarios intrinsically welded to Maltese history. In each and every scenario, Mallia’s very fertile imagination is harmonically complementary between fact and fiction.
Every story he has created to date has proved to be a very enjoyable read, both as mere fiction and as a particular episode in Maltese history.
Mallia has just published yet another novel in this manner: Il-Prinċep tal-Birgu, (The Prince of Vittoriosa) a particularly dramatic saga with the Sette Giugno as a background and the preeminent social reformer Manwel Dimech (1860-1921) and his hugely controversial ideals as the cause célèbre.
Jargos, a young university student, fully aware of the unrest in the Maltese population as poverty and ignorance continue to thrive under British rule, leads a section of fellow students in the Sette Giugno riots of 1919. Renza, the girl he loves, also a university student and the daughter of a colonel in the British Army, joins in the fray.
Dimech’s ideals had long been stirring the Maltese to resort to action, and he was regarded as a very dangerous black sheep. The British had long joined the Church in its relentless attempt to keep the people submissive and in ignorance, regardless of the tragic consequences, and Dimech, then regarded as the main perpetrator in the quest for change, became the target for utter revenge to both of them.
Manwel Dimech’s ideals had long been stirring the Maltese to resort to action, and he was regarded as a very dangerous black sheep
He was excommunicated by the Church in due course and exiled from the country to ultimately experience a sad and tragic end.
Not all the clergy, however, were against Dimech’s ideals. Canon Federik, who formerly lived in Australia and subsequently at Qormi, was one who strongly agreed with Dimech’s principles and saw in Jargos a formidable disciple of the reformist and, as the plot thickens, he never fails to give him a ready helping hand.
From Qormi, Federik ends up in Vittoriosa, where Jargos, now a fully-fledged disciple of Dimech, is regarded as the prince of the town, his ideals now fully armed to combat the power that the British and the local Church were still struggling to retain, but which, after the Sette Giugno riots, was gradually beginning to decline.
As in all his other novels, Mallia’s story here is fictitious, but the history is as real and captivating as ever.
The combination between the two, however, is formidable. Mallia has once again succeeded in giving us a novel that is not only a joy to read, but also offers a good look at Malta in days gone by, at times nostalgic and at others utterly tragic.