August 2014 Release

August release of A Murder at Dragon Bay

A Murder at Dragon Bay. Novel.

378 pp.

• ISBN-13: 978-1500696580 
  ISBN-10: 1500696587

'Lost at Sea' read Alfons Herzbruch as he raised the newspaper and awaited the arrival of the breakfast waitress. This was the politely restrained headline upon which the Cumbrian Morning News had settled. Presumably, thought Alfons Herzbruch, the publication had little in the way of local rival newspapers and did not need to jazz up stories to retain its readership. He studied the photograph which accompanied the report. Below it was a caption in italic type which read: 'Mrs Amalia Crowe, née Rafferty, the victim of a fatal boating accident'.

In paperback via CreateSpace: A Murder at Dragon Bay

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The Kindle edition : A Murder at Dragon Bay

Above: An article in the Cumbrian Morning News. Here the death is still understood to be the result of an accident. 

The sun may be shining in August  but terrible things - oh, let me tell you: terrible things! - have been happening at Dragon Bay. 
Who would have thought that such deeds could be perpetrated in this idyllic little corner of the world? Fortunately, the private detective Mr Alfons Herzbruch is on his way to sort things out.

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AMAZON REVIEWS:

By avid reader on 24 Nov 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

If you're an Agatha Christie fan, you'll either love or hate this book. Love it, because it's totally written in the Christie style, with a Poirot equivalent in the figure of one Herzbruch, apparently an exile form Hitler's Grossdeutschland, though perhaps not a Belgian, with red-herrings a-plenty and an unravelling by our eponymous detective in the last chapter. Hate it, because in many ways Lawrie out-does Christie and does it so much better. True, the first chapter is over-egged with epithets - there's scarcely a noun that's not drowning in some adjective or another, and Herzbruch's final analysis of possible scenarios is a long-winded as his listeners' patience is short, but between these narrative pillars the plot moves at a brisk pace, and the whole thing is, actually, hugely enjoyable. I have the feeling - and the hope - that this is not the last we will see of Herzbruch, and look forward to the next five or more installments!

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FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY:
CHAPTER THREE, STRANDED

'In the High Street there was a subdued bustle of unhurried shoppers. A small queue had formed inside the butcher’s, but no one seemed in a rush. Outside the post office a child tugged at his mother’s coat tails but the woman ignored him and went on with her conversation with another shopper who was rocking a pram. As he passed, Herzbruch picked up a scrap of conversation. They were chatting about the capture of the ‘Doorstep Strangler’ and seemed much relieved that this villain had been apprehended at last. Herzbruch paused for a while at the entrance to the newsagent’s. Finally he came across the George Arms which, as an advertisement announced, offered morning coffees and light luncheons in its adjoining Tea Room.'

FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY: 

CHAPTER FIVE, AT THE CANTY PUDDOCK 

Charleshaven was a small town with a church and a market square from which radiated outwards a network of streets flanked by the terraced or semi-detached homes of the modestly situated citizenry. After passing a few closed and darkened shops the two men halted in front of one of the few brightly lit buildings. This was The Canty Puddock, an inn which, as the weather-beaten hoarding outside advised, specialised in ‘lunches, evening meals and refreshments’, the latter being served in either the saloon bar or the ‘snug’. ‘It’s the best hotel in town,’ joked Roger as he helped Herzbruch with his luggage, ‘and the only hotel in town.’ 

FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY: 

CHAPTER FIVE, AT THE CANTY PUDDOCK 

Herzbruch looked around his room. It was a modest affair, but it looked clean. He tried out the bed and found, almost to his surprise, that it was comfortable and that the sheets were crisp and smelt freshly washed. A coal fire had been prepared and was burning in the grate, lending the room a homely, cosy fragrance. He walked to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. The sash-window was warped and badly jammed, but with an insistent tug Herzbruch managed to prise it open. He could hear the sea and, what was better still, he could smell the sea, too. He was exhausted now, but he took delight in being exhausted. His movements were slow. The day’s events had taken their toll of him. The early call that morning. The inconvenience occasioned by a taxi driver who had caused him to miss his train. And then the hours spent trying to pass the time in Drumlyle. The encounter with Roger Elphinstone which had led him to upset his plans to return home and to travel instead, altogether unprepared, northwards, to investigate a death for which Roger felt responsible and which he, Herzbruch, should scrutinise with a view to filling in the details which had gone astray in Roger’s mind and thereby put that mind at rest as to the eventuality of its own unintentional guilt. 

Herzbruch left the window open, but tugged the curtains back along the sticky curtain rail until they were fully closed. The heavy curtains swayed phlegmatically on the intermittent breeze. Herzbruch took a seat in the worn-looking armchair by the fire. A polished brass coal-bucket stood on the hearth, from which, presumably, he was to help himself should the fire dwindle. He stretched out his legs in front of the fireplace and studied the plush carpet. Its pattern was an alarming assembly of coloured crisses and crosses, a tartan of some fashion which, in any other environment, would have provoked his strongest objections on aesthetic grounds. Here, however, it was forgivable, no, more than that, he thought, it was fitting and actually quite pleasing. It matched the whole parochial, off-the-beaten-track ambience of the establishment. It would have been arrogant and ungenerous in the extreme to look mockingly at the decor of The Canty Puddock. 

FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY: 

CHAPTER SEVEN, TEA AT LAIRDHALL HOUSE 

Lairdhall House was a ramshackle affair which had been built some time in the seemingly interminable Victorian era during the vogue for all things Scottish, a fashion which had been established by Her Majesty at the time and which had consequently been followed by numerous imitators. Since its original construction various owners had deemed it necessary to enlarge the property, but in a haphazard manner. As a result it had become a rambling, idiosyncratic structure with an eccentric soul of its own. 

Above: Lairdhall House, with outbuildings. Southern prospect. Late 19th century. Oil on canvas. Painting by lesser-known local artist of no particular note.

FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY: 

CHAPTER EIGHT, INSPECTOR SLATE

A little way inland from the point where the Stane Brig traversed the river, man had left his imprint on the Yew in the form of a series of salmon ladders which had been hewn from the rock to ease the passage of the fish as it fought its perennial way upriver through the rapids to its place of spawning and to its once-upon-a-time place of birth. Here the ferocious might of the river, which is concealed beneath its majestic flow nearer the coast, is undisguised.

FROM THE NOVEL A MURDER AT DRAGON BAY: 

CHAPTER NINE, DRAGON BAY

At Dragon Bay the tide not only had the power to drag a ship out to sea, but also, should some unlucky vessel stray too close to shore and should the tides so conspire, the strength to smash its heart out on the rocks. And that, presumably, had been the fate of the Indian Empress. He looked out to sea and in his imagination he saw the Indian Empress being blown around Beacon Point, he saw Roger Elphinstone struggling with the sails, saw Amalia being swept across the deck as the vessel foundered on the rocks, he heard the hull grinding and splintering and looked on, in his mind’s eye, as the back of the little yacht was mercilessly broken and its two passengers cast into the icy water. Herzbruch’s thoughts were interrupted as he became aware of an approaching figure.

A short clip showing the scene of the accident at Dragon Bay:

A short clip showing Beacon Point and Dragon Bay:

Let me tell you a story.

Are you sitting comfortably? 

Then we can begin.

In paperback via CreateSpace: A Murder at Dragon Bay

In paperback on Amazon: A Murder at Dragon Bay

The Kindle edition : A Murder at Dragon Bay

Late July Proofreading

A pleasant spot for proofreading. 

52.15N / 21.0E. 

31 degrees in the shade.

Very Late July Proofreading

The return of the red pen.

Another pleasant spot for proofreading. 

57.15N / 2.094W. 

16 degrees in the sun.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

A Murder at Dragon Bay

by Steven William Lawrie

Giveaway ends September 19, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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Literary Reviews

Literary Reviews

Here are a number of recent literary reviews:

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Jörg Bernig, Anders

405pp. German.

‘Wenn einer aber erst einmal schwamm, dann war da nur das Wasser’ (Engl.: ‘But once you’d started swimming, there was only the water’). Thus–with the central character’s recollections of carefree adolescent days–begins Jörg Bernig’s new novel, and in so doing, from the very outset an important leitmotif in the novel is introduced and one which resounds with a plethora of philosophical and literary aquatic associations–from the transit into the underworld via the river Styx of ancient Greek mythology to the idea Πάντα ῥεῖ, attributed to Heraclitus, that everything flows, that all things are in flux and that no one can step into the same figurative river twice, and from Shakespeare’s heartbroken, mad, eventually drowned Ophelia–whose corpse has bobbed repeatedly to the surface as a literary and artistic motif ever since–to the symbolic use of water, rivers and oceans in the works of Anna Seghers, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, Günter Grass, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemigway, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and numerous others.

The stretch of water in question around which the adolescent memories revolve and to which the middle-aged Peter Anders, the central character, returns in the seemingly vain hope of stepping a second time into the waters of his youth, is a fictitious ‘Pezelsee’. Like other geographical locations, this name has been invented, but the reader nevertheless gains the impression that Bernig is describing an area in the former GDR and one which is not so very far removed from Dresden and Radebeul (the ‘Labenbrod’ of the novel) where the novelist himself is located. And the stetch of time in which the action takes place is on the one hand in the late 2000s, as reference to collapsing banks makes clear, and on the other hand somewhere in the late 1970s, for this is the period in which the recollections of swimming in the untroubled adolescence of Anders’s youth are placed.

Ostensibly, the catalyst for Anders’s crisis is the false accusation made by one of his school pupils that she has been molested by Anders, a teacher at a grammar school. Eventually it transpires that with the accusation Anders has been the victim of a political plot (and mud, as the narrative shows, sticks), but in reality it seems that the origins of Anders’s crisis lie elsewhere, for the character is deeply disillusioned by his pupils and by a system which rewards the indolent through-the-hoop-jumpers, is disappointed by and alienated from both his children, and, as if that were not enough, Anders’s marriage is also steaming full speed ahead onto the rocks (although which egg came before which chicken before which egg is a matter for the reader to decide).

And all the time–while Anders flounders under the repercussions of the false accusation, while his estrangement to his wife grows, while the banking world collapses and while the banal routine of life continues–the awareness of Anders and of the other characters in respect of the passing of time, and, implicitly, of the brevity of human existence, grows, and the present tense of the novel becomes increasingly infused with recollections of the characters’ pasts, almost as if the passing of time on the scale of one brief human life were so minute as to constitute an illusion.

Halfway through this frequently poetic novel (there are some admirably phrased and highly lyrical passages) the main character vanishes and is assumed to have committed suicide and to have drowned in the very lake where he and his childhood friend had whiled away the happy summer days of their youth, never quite daring to attempt the dangerous swim across to the other bank. Unbeknown to Anders’s wife– who increasingly deteriorates in the face of the uncertainty over her husband’s disappearance–, however, Anders has survived and, suffering from temporary amnesia, embarks upon a parallel family existence with the woman and her child who have rescued him from the lake. This temporary flight from the complexities of everyday life (and here there is a clear echo of Bernig’s previous novel Niemandszeit) cannot, however, last, since it is impossible to step into the same waters twice, and Anders returns home, but only to discover that his wife, thinking him dead, has herself committed suicide (the allusion to Romeo und Juliet is unmistakable).

The novel concludes with a circularity which leads Anders back to the lake of his adolescence–where the final outcome, suicide or the struggle to stay afloat, is not articulated – and to Anders’s repeated recollection that ‘Wenn einer aber erst einmal schwamm, dann war da nur das Wasser’.

S. Lawrie

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Michael J. Ellis, England to Me: The Boy Genius Who Won the World Cup, 170pp.

Mr Ellis sets out to describe a ‘true story’ recounted from the perspective of his narrator, a thoroughgoing football enthusiast who is very much akin–one suspects–to the author himself as well as to the many other avid followers of the sport, and Ellis does so very successfully in as far as both the narrator and the character of the young footballer, Matthew Nelson, swiftly assume an aura of authenticity and are, despite the inevitable restrictions of the chosen narrative perspective, altogether rounded and convincing characters who live on in the reader’s imagination well beyond the end of the book.

Much of the tension in this work, initially at least, lies in the conundrum of the character of Matthew Nelson and in the attempts by the narrator to make sense of this less than straightforward figure who, it seems, does not fit easily into the stereotypical straightjacket of the footballing personality, since Nelson–who is presented as a footballing prodigy–retains nevertheless a self-effacing modesty and, in contrast to the vanitas of our real world vacuum-headed ‘celebrities’ (sporting and otherwise) a realistic sense of his own ultimate insignificance within the grander picture of mankind. Here, we have a sporting genius who, like all tolerable geniuses, is possessed of a sarcasm which is directed altogether towards an own goal in that its target is none other than himself. The character also smokes, which makes him automatically endearing, can cite Mark Twain, and is wholly unperturbed by the (incorrect, as it emerges) rumours of his homosexuality–a complete outsider and non-conformist in a world where studied image-manufacturing is de rigueur.

The story of Nelson is told from the perspective of a football-mad narrator, over whose shoulder the author regularly (thank goodness) looks in order to infuse the narrative both with a wit and with literary allusions to which, it must be proposed, the narrator himself seems less likely to be disposed, and, since Ellis provides intricately detailed accounts of various football matches, much of this novel is dramatic rather than epic.

The merit of this novel lies less in the fictional documentation of an arbitrary, imagined sporting victory–for victories come and go and are soon forgotten (as the character Nelson seems to understand), but more in the examination of the enigmatic Nelson character which consists in the challenge of understanding another mind. Much like Grass in Katz und Maus or Wolf in Nachdenken über Christa T., Ellis circles the character of Nelson, but ultimately only the astute reader will arrive at a genuine understanding of the often inaccessible: a fellow human being.

A worthwhile book. 

S. Lawrie

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David Wagner/ Jochen Schmidt, Drüben und drüben: Zwei deutsche Kindheiten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2014), 336pp.

Towards the centre of this book lies a picture. Spread across a verso and recto leaf is a photograph of a wall of reinforced concrete with a small gap, the latter situated in the book gutter area. The image is a reminder of the existence of the Berlin Wall, while the small opening in the pictured wall suggests either the existence of a cultural porousness between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany or, alternatively points towards the breakdown of the Wall in 1989 and the subsequent unification of Germany.

The photograph also marks the boundary between the two texts which lie on either side of this division–one written by David Wagner, born in 1971, who grew up in the Rheinland of the Federal Republic, and the other written by Jochen Schmidt, 1970, who grew up in East Berlin in the German Democratic Republic. The unusual use of this illustration is echoed in the rest of the design of the book. There are two front covers to this book, each respectively highlighting one of the two authors and each reversing the order of two further Berlin Wall pictures, one of these grey and dreary (the GDR side of the Wall), one sprayed with colourful graffiti (the FRG side). On the book spine, part of the title is turned on its head, while the text by Wagner and Schmidt are also upside down when compared to one another. Wagner and Schmidt (or Schmidt and Wagner) write ‘towards one another’, so to speak, and eventually meet on either side of the wall picture where page 151 (Wagner) and page 183 (Schmidt) meet–a fact which reveals immediately that Schmidt is the more loquacious of the two.

The two authors have agreed upon (or been set by the publisher) a series of topics (‘Kinderzimmer’, ‘Wohnzimmer’, 'Küche' etc.–children’s room/ bedroom, living room, kitchen) upon which they base their respective, although not so fundamentally different, recollections of childhood and adolescence in each of the two countries. Not surprisingly, perhaps, despite the existence of two separate German states the two accounts betray many commonalities in the description of the preoccupations and interests of childhood. Both accounts are marked, too, by the haunting memory of the fear of nuclear war, a very real fear which–as anyone old enough to remember will confirm–was not just restricted to the east and west of Germany in the Cold War era.

Readers unfamiliar with the division of Germany, or–perhaps more probably–with the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic (now more alien to democratic Europe than the pre-1990 Federal Republic) will be particularly interested in Schmidt’s description of the milieu and circumstances in which he grew up: the restrictions imposed by the state, the uncomfortable position of Schmidt’s religious family within that state, the lack of consumer goods, the fascination with (the quality of) all things (food, music, technology) which made their way from the west to the east.

One striking difference in the two accounts, which may or may not be taken as typical of the east-west divide, is the attitude to the respective neighbour. While Schmidt recalls a pronounced admiration of and interest in the Federal Republic, Wagner remembers a great lack of interest in his school class when the topic of the GDR was dealt with, and he continues: ‘Wiedervereinigung? […] Was hatten wir im Westen […] mit dem Osten zu tun? […] War die deutsche Teilung, fragte ich mich, nicht der gerechte Preis für den Krieg? […] Die Teilung war in Ordnung, mir fehlte nichts.’ (Engl.: ‘Unification? […] What did we in the west […] have to do with the east? […] Was the division of Germany, I wondered, not the just price to pay for the war? […] The division was fair enough, I wanted for nothing.’) Wagner’s sentiments in respect of the GDR, which, at least in the experience of the writer of this review, were far from unique amongst younger West German citizens in the period to which Wagner refers, suggest that by the 1980s and 1990s the German-German status quo looked unlikely to change and that the relationship between the populations of eastern and western Germany had become something akin to one of unrequited love. Hence, Wagner’s and Schmidt’s recollections of the day the Berlin Wall opened imply that the event came unexpectedly amidst the preoccupation of their daily routines, as these recollections are not marked by the monumental pathos of the televised scenes from Berlin: Wagner recalls the banalities of a Latin exam in school; Schmidt cites the unpleasant experience of early morning army kitchen duties, while his reaction to the news of the opening of the Berlin Wall is to note that he would have been more interested in having a few hours of sleep.

This publication, although timed, presumably by the publisher for marketing reasons, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, is concerned less with the demise of the GDR, with the opening of the Wall and with the subsequent unification of Germany, but concentrates instead on two childhoods in states which at the time did not look at all as if they were moving towards one another.

This book, which was published in August 2014, is currently only available in the German language.

S. Lawrie

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Michael Moran, A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland

384pp.

Mr Moran's study of Poland has become something of a standard work for non-Polish speakers—anyone who travels to that country will immediately encounter this publication in the Chopin airport bookshop and at other outlets in the capital.

Moran, who moved to Poland shortly after the demise of the Eastern Bloc and who eventually married and settled in that country, combines in this work a series of anecdotes concerning his personal experiences of Poland during the wobbly post-dictatorial years, prior to Poland finding its democratic feet, alongside an erudite and eloquent insight into aspects of Polish culture and history, whereby Moran displays a particular interest in all matters musical (the previously mentioned Chopin, amongst others, refers).

The admixture of anecdotes and historical and cultural excursions (we learn not only of Moran's Rolls Royce motor car, in which he roamed around the bumpy roads of post-'communist' Poland, but also of historical curiosities such as buffalos being catapulted into the air at a shooting event) provides a refreshing literary cocktail which is spiked with the clearly discernible traces of the author's modest but nevertheless evident erudition.

Moran's prose is polished and his accounts are both entertaining and informative for anyone who is interested in finding out more about this 'country in the moon'.

S. Lawrie

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Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas (Spanish: El Club Dumas)

Translated from the Spanish by Sonio Soto

362pp.

Lucas Corso—book-hunter and quasi-detective and the main character in this novel—is a reader who is ‘too clever for his own good’ and whose overzealous intellect is seduced by the folly of a perceived intertextuality between the strands of the two stories (Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and a demonic work entitled De umbrarum regni novem portis) which Corso is following and, in so doing, which also shape his own story. This is a work in which the character Corso, like Grass’s narrator Pilenz in Katz und Maus, begins to question his own existence and wonders whether he (as well as those around him) is no more substantial than a character in a novel (in this respect Corso, and indeed the novel itself, assumes something of the characteristic of the snake which swallows its own tail, pictured on the frontispiece of De umbrarum regni novem portis). ‘If this were a work of fiction’, Corso is told, ‘you as the reader would be principally responsible’, but these words are simultaneously intended for the reader of The Club Dumas for whom Pérez-Reverte lays out an entertaining and informative literary dish of red herrings.

The novel is accompanied by a number of illustrations, some purporting to be images of the prints in the ancient De umbrarum regni novem portis. These images remain curiously anonymous—at least, in the English-language edition—and it is a regrettable omission that the publisher, although acknowledging the work of the translator, does not see fit to credit the artist. The images of the nine plates from De umbrarum regni novem portis are an essential accompaniment to the narrative, and, indeed, constitute an entertaining addition which demonstrates how text and image can (deliberately misleadingly) be combined to suggest authenticity—as e.g. Sebald had already proven in Die Ausgewanderten. Sadly, however, these images can by no means be said to be convincing as authentic artistic creations from the world of incunabula of many centuries past, as their appearance immediately betrays them to be straightforward twentieth-century pen and ink drawings. This is a curious weakness in a novel which exudes such a fascination for the aesthetic and intellectual value of books.

The author himself gives in to the temptation to spice things up a little by recourse to a reference to National Socialism, whereby the character of Frieda Ungern is described as ‘the Fürher’s (sic!) personal astrologer’, a description which is either a deliberate fabrication (the suggestion that Hitler had any sympathy for the charlatans of that particular pseudo-science is straightforward historical nonsense) or it is an intentionally misleading reference which parallels some of the other forgeries to which the novel refers.

Although the novel is a translation, due to linguistic limitations the current reviewer is unfortunately unable to comment on the formal and semantic equivalence of the English version. The English prose does have an unfortunate tendency to employ short forms (‘don’t’ etc.) in the narrative passages, rather than restricting this to the sections of direct speech, and there are one or two typos, otherwise, however, it is best left to a Spanish-speaker to evaluate the accuracy of the English translation.

The novel includes some memorable scenes such as the description of the impoverished bibliophile whose financial dire straits force him to sell off, and hence reluctantly sacrifice, one valuable book after another in order to retain the remainder of his beloved collection. This is a novel marked, too, by energy, wit and humour, the latter, for example, evidenced in the delightful closing passage in which the horrifically deluded Varo Borja seeks to conjour up the devil but whose lunatic ceremony and feverish incantations are punctuated by Corso’s insistent and more practically-minded call of ‘I want my money’.

This is a world of the literary imagination populated by a cast of loveable and witty gin-swilling skirt-chasing bibliophiles, rogues and lunatics who are not only clichés, but who seem invested with the knowledge that they are clichés. It is a world in which erudite excursions and consciously melodramatic incidents combine with a playful narrative technique and a plot whose interpretation and supplementation must be provided by the reader who thereby ‘gets the devil he deserves’.

S. Lawrie

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Donal McLaughlin, An Allergic Reaction to National Anthems and Other Stories, 250pp.

Anyone expecting a critique (as the title might suggest) of the parochial narrow-minded nationalism which has so marred the recent history of mankind will be much disappointed by this collection of short stories.

The collection, whose constituent elements were originally published as independent short stories, revolves around the topic of childhood and adolescence in Northern Ireland—and later Scotland—during the period when the conflict and violence between the religious groups of Catholics and Protestants was particularly pronounced, and the stories are told very much from a perspective within one of those two sides. The figure of the narrator himself originates, it seems, from what appears to be a working or lower middle class Catholic milieu, and this accounts for a weakness in the collection in as far as the narrative perspective is restricted to a position within the community which the author seeks to portray, with the result that the accounts remain largely descriptive with very little analysis, let alone criticism (save subtle asides in passing), of the origins of the religiously inspired hatred in this particular geographical scenario. The reader is presented instead with a series of sketches of a tribal atavism and of an intellectually claustrophobic environment whose inhabitants seem altogether incapable of rising above the prejudices and automatisms instilled in them since their earliest childhood. This is a world dominated by the (respective, one concludes) cult and one in which change for the better seems depressingly improbable.

The narrative perspective from amongst the depicted milieu is accompanied by the idiom of the narrator which clearly identifies him as a member of the community which he describes, for the author employs in the figure of his narrator a regional variant of English which is colloquial and which frequently uses lexemes of local origin. Consequently, the language will prove a barrier to any reader who is unfamiliar with Northern Irish/ Scottish expressions, all of which feature with a slightly wearisome frequency, for these short stories are carpeted with a wall-to-wall pattern of regional expressions—dander, wee, folk, youngfolk, craec, weans, granweans etc.—which suggests an almost calculated exclusivity. Even those stories which are set in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Austria or which feature a German tourist in Scotland, although employing more standard English, are marked—for no apparent reason—by a comparable narrative diction and, equally puzzlingly, by an echo of religious problems, problems which have something approaching zero relevance for post-Wende Germany and modern-day Austria.

This is an essentially descriptive account of a bleak milieu—coloured with an only slightly rosy tinge by the (accustomed and understandable) nostalgia of childhood reminiscence—in which an entrenched cultic herd mentality dominates and is perpetuated from generation to generation almost as if the Enlightenment had never taken place.

The merit of this collection of short stories lies in conveying to the hitherto uninformed reader an essence of the milieu from which the religious 'troubles', as they are frequently and rather sparingly termed, grew. Even if the characters depicted as well as the figure of the narrator cannot see beyond the confines of the world here depicted, the reader who can do so will doubtless thank, if not his or her gods, then at least his or her lucky stars to have grown up in a more rational and tolerant environment which has successfully experienced the 'Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit' ('man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage').

A useful book, perhaps, for readers interested in the religious Petri dish which spawned the conflict in Northern Ireland.

 S.Lawrie

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Justiz 
(English: The Execution of Justice), 369pp.

This is a literary detective novel in which Dürrenmatt examines the concept of justice, a concept which he sees as detached from the mere legal system itself.

Some serious criticism of Swiss society. Some absurd and grotesque elements, with which the reader is probably more familiar from Dürrenmatt's dramas.

The current reviewer read this novel when it was first published, forgot in the intervening years how weak the work is and, sadly, re-read it again recently.

The novelist does not appear to be completely in control of his material. The plot lacks a clear sense of direction, although it does not completely merit the expression 'garbled'. These weaknesses find an explanation in the author's afterword in which Dürrenmatt explains that the novel was started and then abandoned in 1957, taken up again in 1980 only to be abandoned yet again, and then finally completed in 1985. The erratic genesis of this work accounts for its unpolished look.

The potential reader might be well advised not to invest time in this novel, but to turn instead to vastly more successful creations such as Dürrenmatt 's literary detective novels Der Richter und sein Henker (English: The Judge and his Hangman) and Der Verdacht (English: Suspicion) both of which are skilfully constructed, entertaining and well-written works (at least, they are in the original versions; the current reviewer cannot vouch for the quality of the translations into other languages).

S. Lawrie

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Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Another outstanding treatise by Harris which combines his neuroscientific research with philosophical excursions on the nature of mankind and on human morality. A book worth reading and digesting slowly and with the same degree of reflection with which it was quite evidently penned.

S. Lawrie

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Jenny Erpenbeck, Heimsuchung

190pp.

(English rendition: Visitation, transl. by Susan Bernofsky)

The title is a play on words (which combines the idea of a 'visitation' (perhaps by the plague or similar) with the idea of 'seeking a home') which is lost  (as so many things inevitably are in translation) in the title of the English language version.

This work terms itself 'Roman' (novel), although that assertion is open to debate, if one accepts the premise that a novel is marked by 'Weltgehalt'. What the reader is in fact presented with here is a series of glimpses into the biography of a building, of a house, and repeatedly over the course of the troubled 20th century of a home. This 'novel', as it altogether unjustifiably terms itself, is unsettling in as far as it argues that what we small humans term 'home' (a pile of bricks and cement) and to which we attach the desperate anchors of our emotional ties is indeed commonly nothing more than a pile of bricks and cement.

Erpenbeck's prose is subtle, restrained - even the horrific mass murder of the Jews and the opportunism spawned by National Socialist anti-Semitism drips only unobtrusively like the imperceptible movement of (coloured) slow-glass -  and non-judgemental and is for that very reason bearable in the face of the cruel century Erpenbeck seeks to describe. If life is indeed nothing but a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more, then this book confirms that notion in the soullessly empty final destruction scene in which the house, around which the biographies of Jews, Nazis and GDR citizens have played, is pulled down, signifying the vanity of human life and the tenuous nature of our brief bursts of happiness until we are heard no more.

This is a sensitive, pensive and persuasive book. This is a worthwhile book. But a  'novel' it most certainly is not.

S. Lawrie

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Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

(2005; London: Doubleday, 2007) 554pp.

This novel has been around since 2005, but most critics—at least the easily impressed ones cited on the ‘Acclaim for The Book Thief’ pages—have been sadly remiss in failing to spot the glaring weaknesses of the work.

Amongst the extracts from the bleating chorus of literary ‘critics’, if the latter be the appropriate term, one quote stands out in its curiously restrained sobriety: The Scotsman newspaper merely terms the author ‘interesting and inventive’, and it is this epithet which is probably closest to the truth, for the novelist certainly provides the reader with an ‘interesting’ narrator in the eerily charismatic figure of the angel of death.

There is, of course, nothing novel about the use of an unusual narrator and it is probably unnecessary to cite the many curious narrators which authors have already employed such as dogs, insects, madmen, the deceased and so on.

Nor is there anything new in Zusak’s resorting to the metaphysical as a literary device with which, in this case, to deliver a panoramic view of the horrific inflation in mortality consequent upon the Second World War. Klaus Mann already did something similar some 70 years earlier in his novel Der Vulkan (1939) which employs angels as part of the storytelling process and even temporarily uses the figure of a (presumably Christian) god as his narrator. Klaus Mann, however, at least makes some attempt in his work to address the question which becomes inevitable given his recourse to the metaphysical in that Mann suggests that both the Christian god and the Engel der Heimatlosen (English: angel of the stateless) are essentially sympathetic to the sufferings of the victims of National Socialism and that the privations of exile are a necessary part of some grand divine plan.

Zusak, however, invokes the metaphysical by his recourse to the angel of death as narrator, but does so while stubbornly refusing to address the automatic question in respect of the evident indifference of the Christian deity to the suffering and death inflicted upon mankind. Is the deity simply not all powerful (how difficult could it really have been to send down a dose of fire and brimstone on the RSHA?), or is he straightforwardly indifferent to human suffering? Instead, Zusak dodges the question completely, even although this question arises again when those characters who have shown human solidarity to the Jew such as the (devout, it seems (pp.353 and 479)) Catholic Rosa, are also killed. Liesel, too, is engaged in some feverish praying (pp.407 and 421) but the question as to the metaphysical response to her prayers is studiously avoided as is an explanation as to why on earth Liesel’s communist parents would have instilled in the child such a firm religiosity.

The author, in the form of his narrator, evades the question as to the metaphysical indifference to human suffering with the customary get-out clause of the religious: ‘it’s not your job to understand […] God never says anything’ (p.358) the reader is instructed via the narrator.

Zusak addresses the topic of life in National Socialist Germany from the perspective of a child/ adolescent, and in so doing he convincingly demonstrates the established wisdom contained in the sentiment that there is nothing new in the world, for in this context a plethora of earlier literary works comes at once to mind, including Ödön von Horváth’s Jugend ohne Gott (1937), Ilse Aichinger’s Die größere Hoffnung (1948) Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959), Katz und Maus (1961) and Hundejahre (1963). Besides works of literature which deal with the topic of National Socialism and the Holocaust, a wealth of publications exists by survivors of persecution, written from the childhood perspective, such as those by Erich Fried and Max von der Grün and Hans Jacobus and Jurek Becker and and and... The crucial difference between these works as well as countless others is that their authors drew largely on first-hand experience, whereas the Australian Zusak, born in 1975, cannot.

The sad fact that Zusak is both culturally  and linguistically out of his depth is demonstrated repeatedly in The Book Thief.

We are, for example, erroneously instructed that the ‘Bund Deutscher Mädchen' (Zusak presumably means ‘Bund Deutscher Mädel in der Hitler-Jugend‘—see Wolfgang Benz et al., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus) translates into English as ‘United German Girls’. It might do, if an expression such as ‘vereint’ were present. None is, hence it would probably have been wiser to stick with the common, and correct, version ‘League of German Girls’ rather than concocting a mistranslation.

One is nothing short of puzzled by the repeated references to a ‘fireplace’ and the fire burning in it (pp.49, 50, 223, 224, 226, 227, and the fireplace is blazing away again on p.323). Before the advent of central heating, German homes were heated by means of a closed tile stove, but certainly not by the hole in the wall fireplace which heated British homes at the time. Even were the novel set in a hovel in some parochial German hamlet (which it is not), it seems highly unlikely that a fireplace would have featured as part of the internal architecture.

The reader is puzzled, too, by the financial dire straits of the Hubermann family, given that the house painter Hans Hubermann is working in his trade and must therefore be a ‘Meister’ and hence be a fairly prosperous member of the lower middle classes. The family’s degree of poverty, however, makes Hans Hubermann look more like a member of the starving Lumpenproletariat.

Dubious historical details such as these abound. The air raid protection measures which Zusak’s tardy NSDAP does not quite get round to until 1942 in the novel (p.348) had in reality already long since been instigated, the Reichluftschutzbund having been established as early as 1933. Mein Kampf, the reader is told, was ‘the book penned by the Führer himself’ (p.131), but Mr Zusak would be advised to study in greater detail the circumstances of the writing of this work (which was in any case dictated, not ‘penned’) as well as the influence of others upon its genesis.

Mr Zusak also succumbs to the myth concerning ‘Hitler’s refusal to shake [Jesse Owens’s] hand’ (p.62) at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, and Zusak fails to account convincingly for how knowledge of this supposed refusal makes its way to the adolescent character Rudy Steiner. The novelist also merrily ignores the fact that black athletes including Owens featured prominently in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Olympia (1938).

The angel of death and indeed, one fears, the author himself are curiously uninformed about the scientifically untenable National Socialist use of the term ‘Aryan’, a term which is unquestioningly (and without the inverted commas it merits) deployed to describe the character Diller (p.52). This term may have validity in the realms of linguistics. It has, as most of us are aware, zero validity as a determination of race.

The reader is further instructed that the NSDAP was ‘otherwise known as the Nazi Party’ (p.67). No, sadly, it was not. If Zusak means, in his English translation, ‘die Nazipartei’ then he needs to be aware that this term was used colloquially and in a pejorative sense.

This novel is clearly not a historical or academic work. It nevertheless strives, in vain, to employ a historical period within a literary context and to make pronouncements upon that period. Zusak asserts, for example, without a shred of evidence that ‘since 1933, ninety per cent of Germans showed unflinching support for Adolf Hitler’ (p.68). Had this novel just been a badly-written undergraduate essay, a marker would at this point be reaching swiftly for his red pen. Nor is it a viable excuse to argue that this nonsense can be attributed to the narrator figure who is, after all, an omniscient angel and should therefore know better than to cast around such assertions.

The tendency towards crass generalisations is continued elsewhere in statements such as ‘Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation’ (p.265) and ‘The Germans loved to burn things’ (p.90) and one suspects here the influence of Daniel Goldhagen, whose theses respected historians have already adequately countered.

Zusak’s sweeping assertions are not only another tiresome example of the simplistic ‘goodies and baddies’ mentality which so plagues any serious literary or academic examination of the National Socialist period, but they also constitute a refusal to acknowledge the existence of anti-fascist resistance as it manifested itself in the activities of members of the Bekennende Kirche and of the SPD and KPD, both in Germany and abroad, as well as in the opposition by men such as Claus Stauffenberg, Oskar Schindler and Georg Elser, to mention only a few amongst the many. Late on in the novel it does eventually occur to the narrator/author that perhaps not all Germans deserve to die in the Allied bomber raids (p.383), but this sits uneasily with the previously voiced generalisations, implying as they do an adherence to the collective guilt hypothesis.

Additionally, Zusak brackets out the question of whether all Austrians (one might consider here Thomas Bernhard’s views on Austrian anti-Semitism, see: Thomas Bernhard, Heldenplatz) deserve to die in Allied bomber raids, or indeed whether all anti-Semites from throughout Europe (the Division ‘Wiking’ refers) deserve to die in Allied bomber raids, or whether the religiously inspired bloodthirsty anti-Semitic mobs in eastern Europe (see, if you can stomach the horrific details: Jan T. Gross, Neighbors) deserve to die in Allied bomber raids. By bracketing out the complex and transnational nature of anti-Semitism, Zusak reduces matters to the simplistic ‘goodies-baddies’ level of German anti-Semitism and does a great disservice to historical truth.

In Mr Zusak’s novel ‘no-one’ (p.399) helps the Jews who are driven through town. Although this is scarcely surprising given the totalitarian nature of National Socialist Germany and the very real threat to the potential good Samaritan of himself being carted off to a concentration camp, Mr Zusak seems to have for a writer surprisingly limited powers of imagination in respect of the historical context and seems to be rather precipitate in casting the first stone and measuring the past with a yardstick fashioned in our overly comfortable democratic 21st century (only applies to some countries).

Mr Zusak fails to make any acknowledgement of the assistance of a German-English translator, so one is forced to assume that no such translator was involved in the novel and that all the linguistic errors are Mr Zusak’s own.

A number of mistakes consist of straightforward grammatical nonsense, such as in the following examples (sadly, this list is not exhaustive):

For ‘Saumensch dreckigs’ (p.75) read ‘Saumensch, dreckiges’.

For ‘Gott verdammt’ (p.128) read ‘Gottverdammt’.

For ‘Scheisse’ (p.298) read ‘Scheiße’.

For ‘Scheiss drauf!’ (p.447) read ‘Scheiß drauf!’

For ‘Scheisskopf’ (p.481) read ‘Scheißkopf’.

For ‘Strasse’ (p.487) read ‘Straße’.

For ‘Deutschland über Alles’ (p.382) read ‘Deutschland über alles’.

For ‘Traum Träger’ read ‘Traumträger’ (p.336).

For ‘Leichen Sammlereinheit’ (p.437) read ‘Leichensammlereinheit’.

For ‘Hals und Beinbruch’ read ‘Hals- und Beinbruch’ (p.338).

Had Mr Zusak opened and read the Duden which he supposedly quotes (pp. 366 et al.) he would have avoided some of these errors. More generally, if the author insists on including German quotes—presumably to augment the in any case very wobbly sense of authenticity—he would be well served by an ability to get them right.

The novel contains further, more puzzling, linguistic slips, such as in the case of ‘Luftschutzwarte’, which, we are wrongly informed, is an ‘air-raid supervisor’ (p.381). It is not. The word ‘Warte’ means ‘observation point’. The dialect word ‘Watschen’, it is asserted, is to be pronounced ‘varchen’ (p.79), which, even allowing for the author’s Australian pronunciation of English, remains puzzling. The word is pronounced /vaːtʃn/.

The supposed Duden definition of ‘Zufriedenheit’ (p.366), whereby Zusak uses the English language, is a mistranslation and is straightforwardly wrong.

‘Vielen Dank, meine Herren’ is deliberately mistranslated into the highly unidiomatic ‘Many thanks, my gentlemen’ (p.280) to make the Nazi character sound teutonically silly. This mistranslation is not some subtle form of indirect internal characterization, but a rather cheap trick—no English-speaker would express himself in this way, and neither would mutatis mutandis any German speaker. Zusak presents us with a further mistranslation when he renders ‘Erdäpfel’ (a south German and Austrian variant of ‘Kartoffeln’) as ‘earth apples’ (p.303) instead of ‘potatoes’. Perhaps this is supposed to be some form of joke. Who knows?

Zusak maintains his Monty-Python-like approach to (mis)translation with his misleading explanation (perhaps this is another joke?) that ‘Hals (sic) und Beinbruch’ (p.368) means ‘She told him to break his neck and leg’. No, she did not. She told him to ‘break a leg’, for this is the expression we correctly use in the English language to convey the same sentiment as in the source language.

This novel is plagued by a number of further linguistic weaknesses which do much to destroy the literary illusion of reality.

The booklet (pp.232ff.) which purports to have been written by the German-speaking Max on painted-over pages of Mein Kampf bafflingly employs the English language. The text of the German publication Mein Kampf which in the illustration still shows through from below the layer of paint is also, and inexplicably, in the English language. Perhaps the artist, Trudy White, was unable to find a German copy of Mein Kampf, but had she taken two minutes to look, she would have found it in German on the web.

A comparable observation may be made about Max’s sketches and stories (pp.450ff) in which he inexplicably forgets he is German and employs the English language. In a similar fashion the Duden forgets it is a German publication and communicates in the English language (pp.366 et al.).

A further example illustrates that the author is far from at home with the German language. The misunderstanding over whom Frau Holtzapfel is addressing may be possible in the English language. It is not, however, possible in German, as Frau Holtzapfel would have had to choose between the ‘Sie’ and ‘du’ forms to address Frau Hubermann or her daughter respectively (p.393). The English language does not differentiate and uses only ‘you’, but the confusion over who is being addressed would never have been possible in the original German which, the reader is to believe, the characters were speaking. Once again, the literary illusion that the reader is experiencing National Socialist Germany is shattered as a result of this linguistic impossibility. A comparable slip occurs in the scene in which Zusak has the (adolescent) Rudy address the dying (adult) pilot with the familiar ‘du’ form instead of the ‘Sie’ form. Even today, let alone 70 years ago, such adolescent impertinence towards an adult and complete stranger would be unlikely.

Although there is, essentially, nothing new in this novel, the work has its merits. The angel of death as narrator is a nice touch. The author makes a very sovereign use of (the English) language and there are gentle echoes of Dylan Thomas in Zusak’s linguistic creativity, but is is a pity that the author consistently insists on deploying a series of sentencelets (subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object…) or semi-sentences which he fires off like a tirelessly vexing machine gun. The author evidently fears that his readers would be challenged by more intricate syntax.

The principal weakness of this novel remains the author’s personal lack of familiarity both with the period he seeks to portray and the language spoken by the society he wishes to describe, so that it is difficult to resist the conclusion: Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten.

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