Denise Mina (2023) Three Fires.

Three Fires is a short book, based on an audio script Denise Mina wrote for Radio 4. The logline reads something like she reimagines the life of Girolamo Savonarola. Like me, you might not know who that is. By the end of the book you should know.

What are the three fires? Mina offers a definition before getting down to the wordy business of relating them to Girolamo Savonarola.

In his Fire Sermon, the Buddha identified three poisons or three fires, the negative qualities of mind that cause all of the world’s problems: greed, hatred and delusion.     

Some of you might recognise them in others. Friar Girolamo Savonarola was good at that too. He demanded those that had sinned turned back to God. ‘St Peter is overthrown. Here Lust and Greed everywhere.’ Or else…

These things will happen. Lorenzo de’ Medici will die. Pope Innocent VIII will die. The King of Naples will die. The French army will invade and tear through what is now known as Italy. Plague, famine, and war will come to Florence. The French King, Charles the Affable, although a young man will die in a freak accident.

God told him these things. Well, kinda. He recanted when tortured as most folk after getting there ribs smashed and an arm and leg left pretty useless are prone to do. He admitted to his fellow citizens that he’d been a vainglorious liar.

Failure had never occurred to him when he was younger. His path was clear. Born the third of seven children, he is the most brilliant and most likely to save the family name and their fortune.

The Setup. Ferrara 1470.

Girolamo Savonarolo is willing to woo and marry a maid. She is of noble blood, but a bastard. Her dowry will be small. He is willing to overlook that.

‘Laodamia Strozzi moves like a mist. Her skin is the colour of milk. She glides on tiny slippered feet through a landscape of columns and red frescoes.’  

He tells her and her chaperone he will one day be a famous doctor, like his grandfather a professor at Padua and physician to the House of Este. Honest money. Not made from the usury—prohibited in the Bible—that the Strozzi house enriched themselves with. This he is willing to overlook too.

‘To me, you are nothing,’ she says. ‘You are not of my class. Your father is a feckless idiot. You have no money and I would never stoop to marry you. I find you ridiculous.’

Denise Mina reminds the reader no well-brought up young lady would ever say these things. But that is how Girolamo Savonarola remembered it. He burned.

What happens next is a burning. Civil War for control of Ferrara 1471. The Duke is dying (poisoned?). No heir apparent. The Savonarolas board themselves up inside their house as factional groups fight it out. Girolamo witnesses his neighbours, great ladies, gang raped. Children beaten and burned to death. He witnesses war and asks how God can let this happen?

He becomes inward and obsessed. Taking to walking great distances and fasting as he takes in the state of the nation. The debauchery, the gambling, the lewd goings on, the sodomy—and that’s just in the church.

God makes a bet with Girolamo Savonarola. Who you bless, I’ll bless. Who you curse I’ll curse.

The upward trajectory. God finds a way. It doesn’t happen at once. Time has no meaning to God. Gianolamo must pick up certain skills. How to speak publicly. How to use rhetorical tricks to keep the audience engaged.

‘Being a prophet is dangerous. It means that the Almighty trust Savonarola more than He trusts the pope.’

Popes like the Eighth Innocent who routinely sell Cardinal’s robes and have a price list for the everlasting forgiveness of any crime might not look kindly on not getting a cut of the deal. God might not be damnable but Savonarola is certainly within his remit.

Excommunication does not mean for life but for all eternity. Savonarola has a free hand in purging Jews, (some) gays and most women. Refugees and poor people generally can be added as fuel to the fire.

Nonconformists. Now there’s a word. Pouring petrol on Jews, gays, refugees and poor people, the old anti-establishment shtick doesn’t work as well when you are the establishment.

• Trial by fire. Now there was a novelty act. Taken literally. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar's golden image. They were thrown into a fiery furnace, but God protected them, and they emerged unharmed.

Savonarola has taken up a challenge. His men will walk through a fiery pit and God will protect the righteous. The Franciscans have taken up the Dominicans’ challenge. They too will walk through a fiery pit. Whatever group isn’t burnt to death wins God’s approval.

‘The walkway of raised earth is thirty feet long and five feet high…Stacked along the high sides are logs of well-dried wood and kindling sticks, soaked with resin and oil to make it burn fast and hot and even.’

The Bonfire of Vanities burnt things. Books, fine clothing, art, musical instruments, cosmetics, gambling apparatus. A purification of Florence by fire.

Neither the Dominicans or the Franciscans walk through the fire. God sent a storm to soak the wood. Savonarola has lost credibility. He’s lost the crowd. Mina suggests he lost the middle-class, the neither rich nor poor. She was prophesizing exactly what will happen to the moron’s moron Trump after her purges against the poor fail and he loses the middle-classes. Surely he will be struck down and the devil will come for him? The Bonfire of Vanities burns overly bright. Read on.      

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