Equal Danger by Leonardo Sciascia

First published:Il contesto: Una parodia, 1971 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Parodic fable/murder mystery

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Imaginary “Spanish” cities, probably analogues to those of Sicily

Principal Characters:

• Inspector Rogas, the protagonist and the shrewdest investigator on the police force
• Cres, the antagonist and the purported assassin, who is never seen
• Nocio, ,
• Galano, ,
• The Ministers, and
• President Riches, the representatives of both private and governmental morality
• Cusan, a writer and friend of Rogas

The Novel

When the district attorney in charge of prosecuting an infamous murder case is himself assassinated one evening in May, the Minister of National Security assigns Inspector Rogas to the case. No sooner is he given charge than news arrives of the murder of another judge in a neighboring city. Besieged by questions of motive and character, Rogas begins to sift among possible explanations.

When yet a third official is gunned down, Rogas concludes that one man is responsible for all three murders. His conclusions lead him through a series of interrogations and interviews which form the heart of this short novel.

One suspect, the victim of wrongful imprisonment, is found sitting in the sun, reticent, stoic, seemingly indifferent to life. A second man, now a mechanic and also unjustly convicted, has become cynical and embittered, a helpless victim of “the system.”

Rogas’ investigations take a different direction when he is presented with an absurd tale about a pharmacist’s wife who has accused her husband, Cres, of trying to kill her with poisoned rice and chocolate. Discovering evidence that suggests that Mrs. Cres framed her husband, tricking the court system into putting him in prison while she ran around with other men, Rogas pursues the idea that Cres, recently released after serving five years, may now be taking revenge on those who convicted him.

Meanwhile, Cres has become invisible. Though Rogas learns something about the subject’s strange personality from one of the ex-pharmacist’s friends, Cres himself has somehow acquired a new identity, eluding even Rogas’ expert surveillance. Significantly, Rogas begins to develop a sympathy for his antagonist. Convinced of his guilt, he is determined to find him.

His determination is ironically thwarted, however, when a fourth murder convinces the Government that a left-wing revolutionary group is responsible for the murders. Rogas is pulled off the Cres case and given orders to work with his colleague in the political section, an assignment which he views as punishment for his zeal.

His first interview under this new line of investigation is to be with the editor of the notorious left-wing magazine Permanent Revolution. The editor, Galano, is the houseguest of a celebrated writer, Nocio, who has become disaffected with the sociopolitical establishment and has written a poem which underscores in seamy images the sterility and rankness of society.

Galano is evasive, but Rogas meets him finally at the house of a suspected neoanarchist. With them is a top Government Minister; the startled Minister orders Rogas to appear in his office the next morning. When Rogas stands before the Minister, he is told that what he saw the night before was simply a matter of political accommodation, and that he should continue to investigate the “real” enemy, the revolutionaries.

Convinced now that the next victim is to be President Riches, Rogas succeeds in warning the President. Certain that Cres is still his prime suspect, Rogas is shocked when he realizes that the man he has just passed in the elevator is Cres, who, with his new identity, has taken lodging in the same building as the President, the better to assassinate him.

Rogas determines to stop Cres, but he realizes now that someone—the Government, perhaps—is having him followed. He evades surveillance and goes to a cafe where he tells his friend, Cusan, a committed writer and an honest man, everything about the case. Cusan agrees to help.

The point of view now shifts from Rogas to Cusan. The writer learns through a news broadcast that Rogas has been killed at a museum, together with a member of a rival political party. At about the same time, President Riches is shot dead in his house. Fearing for his own life, Cusan goes to the headquarters of the Revolutionary Party for a final interview. There he learns that Rogas was killed by a Government agent as part of a chaotic plot to forestall an imminent revolution.

The Characters

The characters of Equal Danger are virtual abstractions. Except for Rogas, from whose point of view the story unfolds, the politicians and would-be reformers are mere parodies of corruption and ineptitude.

Inspector Rogas, whose surname derives from the Latin verb, rogare, “to ask,” is an honest philosopher-cop who seeks the truth but whose interrogations lead only to more questions. He is well read, sensitive, and sympathetic. The reader is told, in fact, that Rogas is a man of principles in a country where no one else believes in them anymore.

His principles lead him to ask questions that the Government finds embarrassing. Though he follows orders, he does so only out of a professional sense of duty. Like all good philosophers, Rogas is not far from the truth even when he seems to be sidetracked. Despite impediments, his investigations take him inevitably closer to the real assassin, Cres.

Significantly, the character around whom the plot revolves is unseen—or only briefly, in disguise. This elusiveness, a virtual invisibility, is a crucial aspect of the meaning of the plot. The other characters doubt Cres’s guilt. They are thus unable or unwilling to recognize or believe in the truth. Cres’s name literally suggests “credibility.” Though the real assassin, he is ultimately let alone, ignored, even patronized. He becomes the agent, a sort of angel of death, wreaking havoc on society.

The characters of Equal Danger are thus not flesh-and-blood human beings but representations, analogues of certain destructive attitudes toward justice. The two suspects whom Rogas interviews at the beginning of the novel, for example, depict what happens to ordinary men who come up against the injustice of the court system: They become cynical, despairing, frightened creatures who sit mindlessly in the sun.

Galano, Nocio, the ministers of state, even President Riches, are not shown as individuals but as stereotypes—the intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, the corrupt and inept government officials. Each has his views about the political structure of society, but none can act to save it without being corrupted by it.

Critical Context

Sicilian-born Leonardo Sciascia has produced novels, short stories, and essays which focus on a recurring theme: the individual’s search for justice in a society essentially bereft of it. The society is recognizably Sicilian, and the problem which emerges is Sicily’s inability to defeat the evil represented by the Mafia, a criminal organization that controls all aspects of Sicilian political and social life. This corruption fostered by the Mafia has destroyed honor and decency; justice has become a sham and reason has fled.

The method characteristically used by Sciascia to express this theme is that of the detective novel. Four of his books deconstruct the “whodunit” formula, and Equal Danger is central among them. Like the hero of an earlier work, Il giorno della civetta (1961; Mafia Vendetta, 1963; also as The Day of the Owl, 1984), for example, Rogas is an enlightened policeman, the embodiment of a rational, philosophically balanced intellect, who seeks order amid chaos. Like the other novels of this kind, also, Equal Danger ends inconclusively, on the verge of despair, with the social fabric at the breaking point, and is compact, concise, and taut, stripped of all ornament except wit.

Equal Danger differs from its kin by maintaining an almost surrealistic tone. The setting is not explicitly Sicily, or Italy, but a vague Iberian region curiously nonpictorial. Of Sciascia’s major novels, Equal Danger is the vaguest in terms of place and even characterization. There is an abstract feel to the work, as if Sciascia were trying to fictionalize a philosophical discussion of justice, to give narrative structure to an essay. Sciascia himself has admitted that the difference between his narrative and journalistic methods is often marginal.

Such an abstract quality has the effect of universalizing the problem. The corruption and near-anarchy is thus not a Sicilian or Italian predicament but a condition facing all humanity. The evil is not of Sicily but of the world, of civilization which has abandoned the principles of truth and honor. In this respect, Equal Danger presents a darker view than Sciascia’s other novels in this genre, a view more despairing and less certain of the future.

Bibliography

Cannon, JoAnn. “The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Sciascia,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXIX (Autumn, 1983), pp. 523-534.

Jones, Verina. “Leonardo Sciascia,” in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy: A Collection of Essays, 1984. Edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth.

Prescott, P.S. Review in Newsweek. LXXXII (July 16, 1973), p. 88.

Vidal, Gore. “Sciascia’s Italy,” in The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-1982, 1982.