Turn and face the strange

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novella (of which more later) addressing issues of fundamentalism, Western neo-imperialism and the responsibility of the individual. It is also an account of one person’s journey, from member of America’s corporate elite to anti-Western fundamentalist, a journey which itself inextricably mixes the personal and the political.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist has rather divided critical opinion, in large part due to one element, the framing device used by Hamid. The conceit of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that it is one side of a conversation between a Pakistani man named (with slightly too obvious symbolism) Changez, a Princeton graduate and former employee of Underwood Samson (a fictional American company, prestigious and highly lucrative), and an unnamed American that Changez meets in an outdoor cafe in Lahore. Changez recounts his life to the American, describing his journey from modern corporate Janissary to (as the American would perceive him) fundamentalist and enemy of the country which once gave him a home. The framing device is incredibly artificial, leading to dialogue that is often hugely unconvincing and in which Changez routinely describes things his companion would perfectly clearly be able to see for himself:

You seem worried. Do not be; this burly fellow is merely our waiter, and there is no need to reach under your jacket, I assume to grasp your wallet, as we will pay him later, when we are done. Would you prefer regular tea, with milk and sugar, or green tea, or perhaps their more fragrant speciality, Kashmiri tea? Excellent choice. I will have the same, and perhaps a plate of jelabis as well. There. He has gone. I must admit, he is a rather intimidating chap. But irreproachably polite: you would have been surprised by the sweetness of his speech, if only you understood Urdu.

The framing device runs through the novel, with Changez constantly making references to the surroundings in the Lahore cafe and to the reactions of the American, it cannot therefore simply be taken as a small part of a larger whole. It is not remotely naturalistic, nobody talks like Changez, so elaborately and in such needless detail, nobody would listen so long if anyone did. Ultimately then, the framing device is just that, a clear device, and I think one must either decide to accept it and ignore it or simply choose not to read the work, because if one can’t suspend disbelief in the artificiality of the dialogue then the short length of this work will I think be full of small irritations as Changez once again describes the obvious or summarises for his companion what that companion just said.

Happily, before I started The Reluctant Fundamentalist I was aware of the framing device, and Kevin of the kevinfromcanada blog had reassured me that despite it there was content which made the book worthwhile. I’m glad he did, as in fact once I accepted the artificiality, I thoroughly enjoyed this work. Hamid has a knack for description and paints a vivid picture of the Lahore cafe, Princeton, New York, Underwood Samson and its employees, and all the other locations and people to which the narrative takes us as Changez describes his life.

Where The Reluctant Fundamentalist really succeeded for me, however, was in the space it gave to a multiplicity of interpretations. Underwood Samson is a company that values businesses, sometimes with a view to possible acquisitions, sometimes with a view to cuts in headcount and lesser-performing divisions. Staff at Underwood Samson are trainted above all else to “focus on the fundamentals”, and its staff are themselves economic fundamentalists – utterly focussed on shareholder value, on pure Anglo-Saxon capitalism and on the performance of their jobs (with the high rewards attached), to the exclusion of factors such as social impact or the consequences for the businesses (and their employees) that they assess.

Changez then is not just a reluctant fundamentalist in the obvious sense, but also before he radicalises in that he is a reluctant fundamentalist for capitalism too. He has doubts from an early stage about his role, about the impact his work has on others, he strives to focus on the fundamentals, the numbers, but keeps seeing the wider implications of his work.

In this part of his life, Changez considers himself one of a number of largely interchangeable Princeton graduates, an economic warrior elite, he notes that though they are diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender in values they are all almost exactly alike. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say this fundamentalism is more persuasive than the radical kind, since Changez never seems terribly religious and if he is a fundamentalist still later on he is much more an anti-globalisation fundamentalist than he is an Islamic one (of course, one argument is that he doesn’t change fundamentalism, but rather ceases to be a fundamentalist).

Hamid, himself a Princeton graduate, skilfully depicts America’s elite, its confidence, its absolute sense of certainty and of being the best. He also shows its ignorance of a wider world, of a wider perspective (as subtly commented on in the remark about understanding Urdu, in the quote above). He captures mannerisms such as the way a man shakes his wrist to make his watch settle, a mannerism I have myself oddly enough, with a perceptive eye. His accounts of the working life and of the social life of this corporate elite are well painted.

Changez’s journey out of this elite, flows in large part from his relationship with another member of it, Erica. Erica is young, beautiful and charismatic, and from a very rich and established family. She suffers, however, from depression linked to the death of a past boyfriend from illness. Erica, as the novel progresses, increasingly withdraws into herself, into her fantasy of life with the dead boyfriend, and Changez as he seeks to reach her increasingly himself withdraws into his own fantasy of life with Erica – a fantasy that is as unattainable as her own dreams. One interpretation, again of the many one could make of this work, is that Changez’s journey is not so much political as personal, that his failure with Erica leads to him abandoning the world she forms part of. There is a sense too almost of psychic infection, of Erica’s malaise communicating itself to Changez as he strives to reach inside her and pull her out of her increasingly internal world. In this sense, Changez’s journey is not one between fundamentalisms but one into mental illness, though I do not think that is the primary thrust of the book’s narrative.

Also successful is the picture Hamid draws of America and America’s intervention in the world, an intervention here driven by equal parts ideology and ignorance of local conditions. Hamid captures well the isolated nature of international businessmen, sitting in air conditioned limos and meeting rooms, being whisked past the locals who must simply stand by and watch (he brought strongly to mind a business trip I once had in Chennai, returning to the airport I was myself driven in an air conditioned limo past literally hundreds of locals queuing out in the heat, I did not have to queue with them).

But why do you recoil? Ah yes, this beggar is a particularly unfortunate fellow. One can oly wonder what series of accidents could have left him so thoroughly disfigured. He draws close to you because you are a foreigner. Will you give him something? No? Very wise; one ought not to encourage beggars, and yes, you are right, it is far better to donate to charities that address the causes of poverty than to him, a creature who is merely its symptom. What am I doing? I am handing him a few rupees – misguidedly, of course, and out of habit. There, he offers his prayers for our well-being; now he is on his way.

Finally, I would note that Hamid also nicely brings out a sense of foreboding, of threat, in the dialogue (more accurately, monologue). Changez makes a number of comments, seemingly innocent, but capable of menacing interpretation were you so inclined. He observes how the American looks around in a manner reminiscent of an animal outside its habitat, unsure if it is predator or prey. He remarks on the pleasure one takes in eating food with the hands, commenting on the “great satisfaction to be had in touching one’s prey”, but it remains uncertain exactly who is prey in this encounter, exactly who is the predator.

Overall then, there is much here to recommend, thoughts on the nature of power and of America’s relationship with the world. Thoughts on the connection between the personal and the political, how one can fuel the other, as Erica’s disengagement with Changez is echoed in his disengagement with the West. Hamid compares disparate fundamentalisms, asking hard questions about whether our own free market fundamentalism is itself free of harm. This is a book without by and large answers to these questions, rather it raises issues and asks the reader to think about them. To take just one example, one could argue that Changez was treated well by Underwood Samson and repaid them with disloyalty and betrayal, that America generously gave him all it had to give, and he threw it back. Alternatively, one could argue that Princeton played a part in coopting the world’s brightest, turning them into Janissaries in the service of America, a foreign and imperial power. The work supports both interpretations, and many more.

As well as all this, Hamid is an able writer, this is a tremendously easy read and provided you can ignore the framing device I think it has much to offer stylistically.

What I would not recommend, however, is how the work is presently packaged. Like it’s fellow 2007 Booker nominee, On Chesil Beach, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novella, not a full length novel. Here it is blatantly padded for extra length by the use of a mix of larger than normal font, double line spacing and wide page margins. Even with those tricks, it clocks in at a reasonably concise 209 pages – without them I suspect it would be around half that length. This is particularly frustrating as Hamid is plainly aware that he has written a novella, the character Erica is herself a novelist and twice in the text speaks of the difficulties of the novella as a form (“a platypus of a beast”), it is hard in those passages not to hear Hamid’s voice speaking directly to the reader.

‘It’s more a novella than a novel,’ she said. ‘It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.’

Given that Hamid intends it as a novella, and given that it plainly is one, Penguin’s decision to market it as a novel is one I find frustrating and I would prefer that future imprints present the work as what it is rather than what it is not. That said, Penguin plainly intend it for wide readership, the cover quote (rather oddly to my mind) is from Philip Pullman, who compares it to a thriller. Penguin clearly hope the work has mass market crossover appeal, and given the smoothness and accessibility of the writing they will probably be successful in that goal, quite likely already have been.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-o

Chester Himes is a new author to me, one that I had never heard of until I saw A Rage in Harlem recommended in a Waterstone’s Staff Pick.

However, that reflects more on me than it does on Chester Himes, because some investigation reveals that he is in fact a highly regarded African-American novelist with some forty years of output, not least among which is a series of detective novels collectively referred to as the Harlem Detective series. Himes’ fiction often dealt with issues of race and justice, issues he was perhaps unusually qualified to speak to having spent eight years in jail himself for armed robbery.

A Rage in Harlem is the first of the Harlem Detective series. Written and set in 1957, in it we first meet his two detective characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In later novels I understand they take a more central role, but here they are closer to plot elements than characters, larger than life forces of nature the presence of which drives the actions of others. The real protagonist of A Rage in Harlem is one Jackson, a “square” and churchgoing man, honest and with a profound faith in his girlfriend Imabelle.

As the novel opens, Jackson has been introduced by Imabelle to men who claim to be able to raise ten dollar bills to hundred dollar bills, using a secret technique they possess. As they proceed, they are raided by a man claiming to be a police officer, Jackson is apprehended but the other men run taking their equipment and Imabelle with them. The policeman asks for a bribe from Jackson in return for letting him go, and to get the money Jackson is forced to steal money from his employer’s safe. To get that back, Jackson goes gambling, and loses everything he has (in one of the better written gambling sequences I have read). By the end of this, fairly short in terms of the novel, sequence of events Jackson is penniless, a thief and believes that he is pursued by the police.

It is not giving anything away to reveal that the policeman is one of the gang of swindlers, that Jackson is the subject of a grift, and that he may well be one of the most gullible men in Harlem. All that said, he decides that Imabelle would not have gone with the others willingly, and so with the aid of his brother, a con man and junkie who cross dresses as a nun to swindle the poor by selling modern day indulgences, he sets out to rescue her.

A Rage in Harlem then is a novel of extremes. Goldie, Jackson’s brother, is an extraordinary character. He lives with two other professional criminals who cross dress as part of their own grifts, and they inhabit a world that squares like Jackson cannot comprehend (if they could, they wouldn’t be squares). Many characters are grotesques, many scenes are grimly comic, absurd even with unbelievable elements happily thrown in. At the same time, all this sits with a convincing depiction of life in Harlem in the late 1950s, a life often of grinding poverty, poor education and remarkable isolation from the wider New York City.

The language of the book is vivid, as you would expect, here we have an exchange between Jackson and a taxi driver:

A black boy was driving. Jackson gave him the address of Imabelle’s sister in the Bronx. The black boy made a U-turn in the icy street as though he liked skating, and took off like a lunatic.
‘I’m in a hurry,’ Jackson said.
‘I’m hurrying, ain’t I?’ the black boy called over his shoulder.
‘But I ain’t in a hurry to get to heaven.’
‘We ain’t going to heaven.’
‘That’s what I’m scared of.’

Similarly, here Jackson trades remarks with a shoe-shine boy:

‘Man, you know one thing, I feel good,’ he said to the shoe-shine boy.
‘A good feeling is a sign of death, Daddy-o,’ the boy said.
Jackson put his faith in the Lord and headed for the dice game upstairs on 126th Street, around the corner.

As the novel progresses, Jackson essentially falls through a crack in his world, moving from the realm of god fearing and church going people to the world of hustlers, con artists, pimps and killers. He moves from the world of prey, to the world of predators, and since he is by nature prey he spends a good part of the novel running from people and desparately hoping not to be brutally killed, for brutal death is rarely far away in Himes’ Harlem and in the course of the novel a fair number of characters do die – as often as not from sheer bad luck or meeting the wrong people at the wrong time.

Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson move through this world of casual violence and relentless criminality as part of the forces devoted to keeping some kind of order in place, they are both themselves black, coloured detectives as the people of the time term them. The police department is largely white, the white officers whenever depicted have neither understanding of nor sympathy for the blacks of Harlem, Jones and Johnson don’t have much more sympathy than their white colleagues, but they do understand and that coupled with their remarkable capacity for violence makes them effective and feared men.

They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering to the essential needs of the people – gamekeepers, madams, streetwalkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket.

Discussing the attitudes of the police, takes me to the depiction of race in the novel generally. As is common in novels of this period and earlier dealing with issues of race, black characters are routinely described in terms of how black they are. One may have a coal coloured face, another be an ordinary brown, all of which is essentially merely descriptive, but then a sharp line is drawn between black people who are variously brown skinned and those who are “yellows” or “high yellows”, people whose skin is light in shade. High yellows are seen as more attractive than the brown skinned, and characters (including black characters, almost everyone in the book is black) will refer to others as a “high yellow” making distinctions as finely honed as would be found in any caste system. At one point a bystander quotes an old folk saying, as follows:

Black gal make a freight train jump de track
But a yaller girl make a preacher Ball de Jack

I have seen this distinction made before, in the works of writers such as Hammett and Spillane and in the songs of artists like Leadbelly (who in one sings of his “yellow girl”). A fairly formal differentiation between people according to the degree of blackness present in their skin tone appears to have been fairly common in American life in this period. For all the distinctions drawn, however, between the brown skinned and the yellow skinned, the key difference is with the white skinned. In this book blacks and whites barely communicate, the black characters occasionally interact with white policemen and that unwillingly, their world is a self-contained one and points of contact between black and white experience are few.

Life in Harlem is difficult, poverty is endemic, the police are feared and never assisted – which given they spend most of the novel arresting anyone in sight who looks a bit out of place is hardly surprising. At one point Jackson flees through an alley, slipping in mud, tearing his clothes, getting covered in blood and filth and reduced to rags. When he hits the street, he is not the worst dressed man in it, his appearance is not of itself remarkable enough to attract the near constant police attention.

Colored people passed along the dark sidewalks, slinking cautiously past the dark, dangerous doorways, heads bowed, every mother’s child of them looking as though they had trouble.
Colored folks and trouble, Jackson thought, like two mules hitched to the same wagon.

With poverty comes violence, at one point Jackson goes to a rough bar, where he is surrounded by whores and grifters, marked out by muggers, a whole ecology of crime clustering around an obvious mark. A fight breaks out, to the entertainment of all (the people of Harlem here love watching the troubles of others), and swiftly descends into farce:

Two rough-looking men jumped about the floor, knocking over chairs and tables, cutting at one another with switchblade knives. The customers at the bar screwed their heads about to watch, but held on to their places and kept their hands on their drinks. The whores rolled their eyes and looked bored.
One joker slashed the other’s arm. A big-lipped wound opened in the tight leather jacket, but nothing came out but old clothes – two sweaters, three shirts, a pair of winter underwear. The second joker slashed back, opened a wound in the front of his foe’s canvas jacket. But all that came out of the wound was dried printer’s ink from the layers of old newspapers the joker had wrapped around him to keep warm. They kept slashing away at one another like two rag dolls battling in buck dancing fury, spilling old clothes and last week’s newsprint instead of blood.

As well as race, poverty, brutality and violence, A Rage in Harlem is also full of almost slapstick humour. A car chase in which multiple squad cars pursue a fleeing hearse, which proceeds to careen through a central market scattering livestock, vegetables and meat in its wake and which en route loses its contents including the corpse of a freshly murdered man becomes a form of comic sequence, over the top, grim in that the driver is genuinely terrified but funny because it becomes ludicrous in the extremity of the description. Himes himself described his detective series as “absurd”, his Harlem becomes at times a grotesquerie, filled with freaks and morbid humour. Jones and Johnson are barely people, closer to caricatures of grim law enforcement, Jackson is astonishingly and continuingly gullible, Goldie so unredeemable he spends a fair time drugging Jackson so he can look for Imabelle without interference as Goldie has come to believe she has a wealth of gold on her person. Characters here are not subtly crafted portraits from life.

Well, except one character, Harlem itself. Harlem convinces, Harlem is really the main character of the novel, it is a novel about Harlem, its absurdities and cruelties. And it is in the descriptions of Harlem that some of the book’s best passages are to be found:

Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of gray rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desparate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.
That is Harlem.
The farther east it goes, the blacker it gets.

I’m not sure where I’ll go next with Himes. My (perhaps incorrect) impression is that he wrote what he considered serious fiction, and separately his detective fiction. I enjoyed the detective fiction, perhaps despite and perhaps in part because of its grotesque elements, his serious fiction is doubtless enjoyable too and it would be interesting to see how it compares. Still, I would not wish to give the impression that the crime fiction is not worth reading, it is, and it is that for which he is most famous. There is real skill here, the occasional extremity of description is intentional, not inadvertent and Himes has things to say which are I think worth listening to.

I link here to an essay I found online on Himes work, I particularly liked the reference to him “coupling craft with a searing and sometimes brutal black-humored “fabulism,”", a line I wish I had come up with myself as it definitely captures something of this work.

A Rage in Harlem

Love means such different things to different people

The Kindly Ones is the sixth volume of Anthony Powell’s twelve volume epic, A Dance to the Music of Time. I have been working slowly through the whole sequence for the past few months, but recently had fallen out of the habit, so that as time passed the prospect of picking up the next volume became increasingly intimidating.

Which was my loss, because when I forced myself to pick up volume six, I remembered within a page quite how good a writer Powell is, quite how refreshing it is to dip into one of his books, and quite how much I enjoy this series. Twelve volumes makes for an intimidating target, that’s true, but so far each volume has been a genuine pleasure to read and there is a lightness to Powell’s prose which makes him slip down very easily indeed.

As with other works in the series, The Kindly Ones is formed of a handful of incidents in the life of the narrator, Nick Jenkins, each described in some detail. We open with his recollection of some scenes from childhood, just before the onset of the First World War. We then move back to his present, to 1938 and 1939 and a Britain again faced with the threat of war. This threat is one that in 1938 some still some dismiss as too unlikely to bear out, but which by 1939 has become an unavoidable certainty. In 1938 we accompany Nick on a trip to the country, culminating in a dinner party at the home of a wealthy industrialist and slightly drunken after-dinner party games. In 1939 Nick stays in a bed and breakfast run by an old family servant, arranging the affairs of a dead relative who had gone to stay there. Finally we have Nick’s efforts to use personal connections to get himself appointed as an infantry officer before the fighting starts – despite him having left it a little late and being just a touch too old.

Ordinary life then, ordinary life of the times in which the book is set at any rate. Part of the brilliance of the Dance sequence is how we explore the characters through their quotidian existences, dinner parties, dances, nights with friends, but through all this mundanity we also explore themes which are complex and subtle. Here the characters’ lives are overshadowed by the prospect of war, and by the Kindly Ones, the furies of Greek myth, the Eumenides:

I recalled Mrs Orchard’s account of the Furies. They inflicted the vengeance of the gods by bringing in their train war, pestilence, dissension on earth; torturing, too, by the stings of conscience. that last characteristic alone, I could plainly see, made them sufficiently unwelcome guests.

The Kindly Ones also follows the pattern of previous novels by introducing new characters and themes, while continuing to develop existing ones. If anything, Dance increasingly reminds me of a symphony, as we reach the middle parts more instruments join, more motifs emerge, but certain underlying refrains repeat and grant a consistency to the whole.

Here, recurring themes include the way some live by the will, forcing their perceptions and views upon those around them and by sheer obstinacy of vision controlling their own reality; the way human natures are essentially fixed; and the way people may change in their superficialities and circumstances, our perception of them may shift with greater knowledge or changes to our own situation, but the essence of the person remains the same throughout. Above all, the key theme remains the impossibility of knowing another human being or of understanding the inner truth of another couple’s relationship

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

The Kindly Ones also sees Powell return to the interest in spiritualism present in certain parts of British society during the inter-war years, introducing the somewhat comic figure of Dr. Trelawney, a spiritual guru leading a commune near Nick’s childhood home and who Nick encounters again when he is grown and the Dr. an old man.

As ever, Powell shows a sly wit, his descriptions of individuals frequently managing to bring them fully to life while being at the same time very funny. Here he describes Nick’s father, a man of constant irritability who forever finds the world ever so slightly not quite up to scratch:

My father really hated clarity. This was a habit of mind that sometimes led him into trouble with others, when, unable to apprehend his delight in complicated metaphor and ironic allusion, they had not the faintest idea what he was talking about.

And here Nick and his old friend Moreland discuss Trelawney, and the place of men like him in the world of 1938:

‘What will happen to people like him as the world plods on to standardisation? Will they cease to be born, or find jobs in other professions? I suppose there will always be a position for a man with first-class magical qualifications.’

The Kindly Ones themselves act as a running theme in this volume, both in the coming of war (in 1914 and again in 1939) and in the pricking of consciences. When Nick stays at the bed and breakfast, he encounters a man whose wife he once slept with, and ends up having to spend the evening drinking with him and hearing accounts of the marriage and the wife very different to those he once heard from her. Other marriages are no more successful, with resentment, infidelity and mismatched couples all making an appearance.

Not every aspect of this volume works, a comic episode in 1914 involving cars of the day ends with Uncle Giles stating his dislike of them, and how some Austrian archduke down in Bosnia just had a terrible mishap in one, getting himself shot. The conversation doesn’t wholly persuade, and is for me a rare example with Powell of his themes intruding a little too obviously into the characters’ reality. Equally, Powell continues to be far better at portraying the middle and upper classes, than he is the working.

Other elements, however, show Powell’s characteristic sureness of touch. Recently, I was discussing with Rob of The Fiction Desk how with long running crime series it can be a problem for an author to juggle the needs of writing an interesting novel with the desire of the fans to see what is happening to each of the characters established in earlier works. Rob pointed out that this is simply one of the challenges writers must face. At the time, I thought him a touch harsh, but reading this volume I see that in fact he was completely correct. When Moreland, Nick’s old friend, is reintroduced into the narrative I found myself for a moment struggling to remember exactly who he was among Dance’s vast and diverse cast. However, within a page he had, quite naturally in conversation, referred to the possiblity of himself writing a symphony – he came flooding back to me – Moreland, the composer, of course.

It was cleverly done, and it was noticeable given I had left a longer gap between volumes this time than usual quite how good Powell is at making sure you remember who people are. In a series of this breadth, this ambition to portray a whole society, it’s an essential talent and one Powell repeatedly displays to tremendous effect.

I don’t wish here to discuss plot, I rarely do on this blog, therefore there is a limit to how much more I wish to say at all. Powell is a writer of huge talent, Dance is a series with immense scope, in which characters come and go, living wholly convincing lives yet at the same time embodying themes of social change, aristocratic decline, disparate approaches to life, the crafting by people of their personal narratives and the illusions they live by and much more. I have touched on only a handful of the matters and characters contained in this (just 254 page) volume and the characters who recur within it and continue living their own lives in various proximities to Nick’s. Nick’s world is a breathing one, convincing in its internal connections and its sense that even the more minor characters remain consistent to themselves (sometimes by their still showing the same inconsistencies…).

The Kindly Ones includes then friendship, love, infidelity, guilt, fortune and misfortune. It contains a great deal of comedy, from curious individuals, unlikely (to Nick, anyway) developments and chance discoveries, but it also contains a fair helping of pain and loss and emotional bewilderment. As Moreland states:

One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.

The Kindly Ones

Saying true things on half a page

What I Saw, by Joseph Roth

What I saw is a collection of short pieces of journalism by Joseph Roth, translated and ably introduced by Michael Hofmann, and containing Roth’s experiences of Berlin between the years 1920 and 1933 – the years of the Weimar Republic. The pieces are typically between three and five pages long, often focussing on one location or experience and drawing from it a short but memorable series of observations. It is a form of journalism not uncommon in Continental Europe, but is I think rarer in the English speaking world.

Short pieces of this kind are known as feuilletons. Roth was a master of the form, although famous now for his work as an author (I have only read his Hotel Savoy, which I recommend without reservation), Roth was a lifelong journalist with a passionate belief in the importance of newspapers. The feuilleton is a short piece, but it is not a slight piece. It is intended to amuse, but also to provoke and to enlighten. For Roth, the feuilleton was serious journalism, for all the subjects might be comic or mundane. As Roth himself said:

I don’t write “witty columns.” I paint the portrait of an age. That’s what great newspapers are there for. I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist. I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.

Today probably the most famous writer of feuilletons is Umberto Eco, who has a fondness for the form (and a talent for them, his collection How to Travel with a Salmon is essentially a collection of feuilletons for example).

Roth moved to Berlin in 1920, then to Paris in 1925, but continued to spend time in Berlin until 1933, when Hitler took power. His feuilletons of this period, collected in this volume and arranged by subject matter rather than chronology, capture then the Germany of the Weimar years, a Germany that he knew was fragile and beset with difficulties but one where the horrors of the future were of course yet unknown.

The pleasures of this collection lie in Roth’s skill as a writer, and in his keen observational eye which brings to life matters as disparate as night shelters for the homeless, department stores, a cafe frequented by intellectuals, Jewish refugees from the East, photographs of the city’s dead at police headquarters and much more. Roth was catholic in his choices of subject matter, recording the city and the lives of those within it, this collection is a fascinating record of what it was like to live in the Berlin of those times.

In the course of his columns, Roth takes us through the full range of Berliner life, including here on a journey through its late night dives:

Kirsch the burglar and Tegeler Willy and Apache Fritz are sitting at a table together, while the policeman stands and watches. At the bottom of the well-like passage , Elli’s sitting on someone’s lap, because she’s got new stockings today. If you’ve got new stockings, you’ve got to show them off. Her little blonde ringlets are combed down into her face. They hang there a little stiffly, like starched ruffles. I really think she wants nothing more from the world than to have half a kümmel inside her, and the knowledge that there is another half to come. Let her have it, please. My friend buys her some bread and butter. Now I think she’s happy beyond dreams. New stockings, a kümmel and some bread and butter. It really is an angels’ palace.

And later, in the same article:

Max says to the man in the cap: ‘I need a woman and a claw-jimmy.’ The claw-jimmy won’t be a problem. As early as tomorrow. But a woman – apparently that’s not so easy.
In case of any misunderstanding, Erna screeches: ‘I’m spoken for!’ Erna loves Franz. Erna got a gold filling a week ago, and she hasn’t stopped laughing since. She can’t just let her mouth hang open like a hungry crocodile’s! Oh, no! So if the world is to see her gold filling, Erna will just have to laugh. Erna laughs at the saddest things.

Here Roth brings not only the feel of the dives to life, but also their inhabitants, their small dreams, their vulgarity but also their humanity. Roth is a compassionate writer, it is only the harbingers of the new regime for whom he has no sympathy. Here he describes a bidder at an auction, a man who nearly comes to blows with a rival over a wood carving and a copper vat:

The man is not buying out of sentiment. He is, rather, an exemplar of the new times, in a short fur coat, cigar jammed between metal teeth, all calm and calculating: a schemer, a man working his percentages, confident of victory. God knows what his hands will make of those pots and plates and carvings, how the horrid monsters will change in his storehouses. Twentieth-century man can turn ducats out of all sorts of trash.

What is interesting with Roth’s journalism, is that although it is often full of humour, of warmth and affection, it is not frivolous. Roth was, I understand, highly paid for his pieces, certainly he himself took them very seriously (as the quote I opened this piece shows). His intent is not merely to amuse, but also to show us what he sees around him, to let us see through his eyes. As such, the humanity of his gaze is itself a part of his journalism. For Roth, journalism is not necessarily about objectivity, it is about reportage, it is about sharing a personal understanding so that we might understand too.

Frequently, his pieces while on the surface merely descriptive, contain on closer review social comment. In one piece he describes a park, talking of its benches, trees, park wardens. He describes those who use the park, few in the morning as the locals are at work then – just a handful of unemployed men, later some teenage girls, and come three in the afternoon mothers with their small children who play in the sand. It is a piece of careful observation of the inconsequential, and then we come to the following passage:

Even in Schiller Park the leaves drop from the trees in a timely fashion, in the autumn, but they are not left to lie. In the Tiergarten, for instance, a melancholy walker can positively wade through foliage. This sets up a highly poetic rustling and fills the spirit with mournfullness and a sense of transience. But in Schiller Park, the locals from the working-class district of Wedding gather up the leaves every evening, and dry them, and use them for winter fuel.
Rustling is strictly a luxury, as if poetry without central heating were a luxury.

Roth is still describing the park, the gathering of the leaves is one of the activities that occurs there, as is the children’s play or the habits of the park wardens. That said, Roth is also commenting on how poverty can destroy the sense of the aesthetic, how the appreciation of beauty can itself simply be another luxury. Roth is making an important point, in an article less than three pages long. That, in essence, is the point of a feuilleton. Similarly, in a piece on the Berlin pleasure industry in which Roth describes the various nightclubs of the city, he moves on to discuss the commercialisation of entertainment:

Yes, I had the sensation that somewhere there was some merciless force or organization — a commercial undertaking, of course — that implacably forced the whole population to nocturnal pleasures, as it were belabouring it with joys, while husbanding the raw material with extreme care, down to the very last scrap. Saxophonists who have lost their wind playing in the classy bars of the West End carry on playing to the middle class till they lose their hearing, and then they wind up in proletarian dives. Dancers start out reed thin, to slip slowly, in the fullness of time and their bodies, in accordance with a strict plan, down from the zones of prodigality to those where people keep count, to the third where people save their pennies, to the very lowest finally, where the expenditure of money is either an accident or a calamity.

Again, we move from the merely descriptive, to an analysis of wider forces, but we never leave behind how those forces impact on the lives of the people of Berlin.

Roth does not simply deal in the apparently trivial, he also engages with the Republic itself and with politics (though he treats politics with no more seriousness, nor any less, than he does the discussion of a railway junction). Roth writes pieces discussing how the city comes to a stop for the death of the president in 1925, or on the empty slogans of election campaigns. He satirises modernity, though too he celebrates it and sees something wonderful in human progress. This seems like an ambivalence, but rather I think he is a supporter of modernity when it is in service of human values, and suspicious of it when it seems to traduce those values.

The lives of our fathers’ generation were lived in such poor taste. But their children and grandchildren live in stupendously bracing conditions. Not even nature itself affords as much light and air as some of the new dwellings. For a bedroom there is a glass-walled studio. They dine in gyms. Rooms you would have sworn were tennis courts serve them as libraries and music rooms. Water whooshes in thousands of pipes. They do Swedish exercises in vast aquariums. They relax after meals on white operating tables. And in the evening concealed fluorescent tubes light the room so evenly that it is no longer illuminated, it is a pool of luminosity.

And in another piece:

Because the invention of the airplane was not a declaration of war on winged creatures, quite the opposite: It was fraternisation between man and eagle. The earliest miner did not barge his way sacrilegiously into the depths, he returned home to the womb of Mother Nature. What may have the appearance of a war against the elements is in fact union with the elements; man and nature becoming one. There is exhilaration in skyscrapers as much as on mountaintops.

Roth then is a satirist, but he is also something of a poet. Above all these things, however, he is a journalist and it is as that I think he would most have wished to be remembered.

The final piece in the collection is very different to what has gone before. Written in 1933 and titled “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind” it is a furious piece written in reaction to book burnings carried out by the newly elected Third Reich. Roth writes proudly that German writers of Jewish descent have been defeated, and with them the “banner of the European mind”. Proudly, because with defeat comes no possibilty of collaboration, proudly because what they stood for was the European ideal, the ideal of the intellectual and that the life of the mind has meaning. For Roth, the Nazis are profoundly anti-intellectual, and in expelling the Jews they expel the best of German culture for German intellectual life has been in large part the product of its Jews.

For Roth then, the coming of the Nazis is a defeat for civilisation itself, the German Jew is inseparable from German culture, and in their quest for a pure German nation the Nazis are destroying that which made Germany a country worth living in. His piece is filled with horrifically prescient imagery, poison gas is used repeatedly as a metaphor, and it contains a roll call of defeated authors, poets and playwrights “fallen on the intellect’s field of honour. All of them, in the eyes of the German murderer and arsonist, share a common fault: their Jewish blood and their European intellect.” For Roth, the Nazis were not simply attacking the Jews, they were attacking the very principles that underpin European culture itself. Roth sees no possibilty of coexistence, no means by which the intellectual and the Nazi can live together, their arrival means the death of all he stands for as a Jewish intellectual:

It is only the feeblest dilettantes who flourish in the swastika’s shadow, in the bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we are consumed….

Roth, more than most, understood that when you begin by burning books you end by burning people. The final essay in this collection is a passionate defence of the importance of the intellectual, of the European ideal, of the Jew as a central component of European civilisation.

Looking above, I have quoted Roth a great deal in this piece, it’s hard not to, he’s a gifted writer and eminently quotable. In keeping with that, I end with a final quote on the role of the Jew in Germany, from The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind:

Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!

What I Saw

I write what I see, what I feel, and what I have lived, writing the best that I can, and that is all.

Marthe, by J.-K. Huysmans

Marthe, subtitled “the story of a whore”, is the 1876 first novel of French writer J.-K. Huysmans, most famous for his work Là-Bas, the Damned.

Huysmans is often seen as part of the Naturalist movement of French fiction. He was a disciple of Zola (with whom he later fell out over what he regarded as an excess of materialism and absence of spirituality in Zola’s work), as well as of Edward de Goncourt. Marthe was the first novel addressing the life of licenced prostitutes in French society, a theme more popular than Huysman guessed when he began the work as Goncourt was producing his own novel on the same theme and within a few years so too did Zola. Huysmans had to rush his work to print, a possible explanation for its very hurried ending, and even went so far as to fabricate a backstory for its authorship, so as to ensure his came first of all and to avoid possible charges of plagiarism.

All this, as well as details of initial public reactions, the confiscation of the first print run and something of the climate to which it was released is brought out in the lucid, fascinating yet concise introduction to the Dedalus edition of this work. Together with that introduction, written by the translator (of whom more shortly), the Dedalus imprint comes with useful but not excessive endnotes and examples of original art (and indeed of originally rejected art, thought too risque).

The Dedalus edition of Marthe is translated by Brendan King, a freelance writer and translator with a PhD in the life and work of JK Huysmans. That level of expertise shows in the text, this is a lively translation which is a pleasure to read. Huysmans is fond of slang, of intentional archaisms, of wordplay (the subtitle itself could be read as “the story of a daughter”, “the story of a young girl” or “the story of a whore”, a fact which King notes of itself says much about 19th Century France), King brings all this to life and I would consider his name on any future translated works I encounter a draw in its own right.

So then, all that aside, what of the novel itself?

Marthe is, as the subtitle suggests, the story of a whore. When we first encounter Marthe, she is an actress, in a theatre company notable more for its lack of success than any other trait, she is a former prostitute and it soon becomes apparent that under the laws of the period if discovered as such she can be forcibly returned to the brothel from which she escaped. The story is a simple one, Marthe acquires an admirer, a young journalist named Léo, they become enamoured of each other and the novel follows the course of their relationship, as well as Marthe’s (often dubious) relationship with aging alcoholic actor Ginginet, the man who brought her into acting. There is a plot, relationships between characters develop and alter, but it is not a complex one and therefore I do not wish to speak of it at any length here.

What I would like to speak to is the peculiarly Huysmanian mix the novel contains of humour and social criticism, coupled on occasion with an almost gothic sensibility (at times it is slightly reminiscent of Therese Raquin, which I think must have been an influence, though personally I hugely prefer Marthe to Therese). Here we have two descriptions of the life of the theatre, from different sections of the book:

The audience started to get restless again. What it appreciated above all was the entrance of an enormous actress whose nose seemed to be marinading in a sea of fat. The tirade of verse that spouted from the bunghole of this human wine-barrel was punctuated by a great battery of drumming from the stalls and the poor woman was so bewildered she didn’t know whether to stay or make a run for it.

The play fell flat. Apple-cores flew, owl-like tu-whit-tu-whoos drowned out the noise from the orchestra pit made by two sad old baldies who were scraping the bellies of their cellos. Marthe and Léo took flight. It was every man for himself. The curtain fell. No one was left on stage apart from Ginginet and the two authors of the play, who looked at each other, crushed.
The actor consoled them with a few wise words.
‘Youg men,’ he said, ‘ the profession of dramatic author may not provide you with bread, but at least it’ll grant you plenty of apples. This lot will serve to make a nice apple turnover. As for my opinion on your work, here it is: those who hooted the play were right, those who bombarded me with missiles were dunces. And now, sound the trumpets, I’m off!’

In both passages there is a clear use of physical comedy, but also a refusal to shrink from the unpleasant. The beautiful and the ugly both exist, and so Huysmans depicts both, but in fulfilling that mandate he is not opposed to having a laugh along the way. Equally, Huysmans is drawing on earlier literary traditions, Ginginet is a Rabelaisian character, a rogue I found myself often liking even though he is a drunk, a lecher, lazy, dishonest and a panderer (but perhaps that’s why I like him).

Marthe then is full of humour, indeed at times it is extremely funny (as is Là-Bas, Huysmans’ comic ability is hugely underrated). Marthe does not, however, aim simply to amuse. Rather, it is an almost forensic examination of certain situations, places and people. In this, it is profoundly Naturalist, containing as is typical of that movement a frank approach to sexuality, a study of the individual as product of society and a generally pessimistic (if here blackly funny) tone. Huysmans is often at pains to depict a scene as precisely as he is able, to create an almost painterly sense of it, as this example shows:

The saloon was almost empty when she went in and hadn’t been swept yet. The mirrors on the walls, smeared with pommade from the heads that continually leaned against them, were clear at the top and tarnished at the bottom; the floor, powdered with rouge, was starred with dried spit, phlegm, cigar butts and pipe dottle, the marble table-tops were ringed with tacky stains from dirty glasses, and, at the back of the room on a sofa, a living image of infamy, lay the landlady’s father, whose job it was to work the beer pumps.

Such depictions occur throughout the book, in masterly passages portraying the inside of a brothel, the work of an artificial pearl workshop (painstakingly researched by Huysmans apparently), the exact contents of a morgue and the routine of those working in it. All is precise, all is exactly so, Huysmans lavishes on squalor the attention most authors would reserve for scenes of great beauty. It would be wrong to say that in doing so he gives that squalor its own beauty, he does not nor does he intend to, rather he says “this is” and in doing so shows us exactly what the “this” consists of.

The examination of squalor lies not only in examination of place, but also in examination of people. Marthe has no prospect of redemption, and does not especially seek it. She is trapped, by her circumstances, her inclinations and by her own history. As a former prostitute, she is always at risk of return to the brothel, as an actress she is barely more than a prostitute anyway. She drinks too much, she is promiscuous and not overly faithful, she sells herself because that is what women of her station do, and her fate could be that of any of them. If anything, it is her beauty that causes her to be trapped where the women she grew up with were not. Hers is a life in which the choices are few.

Marthe contains passages of great subtlety, the conversation between Léo and Marthe as they go to his apartment for the first time, running out of things to say to each other and sex becoming an escape from awkwardness, this is brilliantly observed. Huysmans is often at his best when addressing the banalities of flawed relationships, the small compromises and strained silences, above all the petty resentments. It also contains, however, it’s share of dramatic speeches, of confrontations and battles, each of which is full of passion but none of which achieve any great change to the characters’ fates:

‘Look!’ She shouted, getting more worked up the more she cried, ‘youd have done better to let me die. Believe me, I’ve thought about it enough! You know how it is, you lose your head for a moment, you think it’s all very simple to climb up on to a parapet and jump. That doesn’t last long, let me tell you. You get a right fright, up there. It churns your stomach, that boiling water under the bridge; it’s as if you’re being gripped by the throat, being strangled. And that’s stupid as well, because it would be better to finish it all quickly than to continue to live like I’m doing! Don’t you see, Ginginet, you can say what you want, but Léo is a good boy all the same. I’ve behaved like the worst of women with him. I’d get sloshed you know, and he’d put me to bed, and he looked after me when I was ill. Would you have done that? You? you’d try to get pissed on what was left in the bottle. As for what you think of me, I don’t give a damn. Between people like us there’s no such thing as love. We meet someone and sleep with them, just like we eat when we’re hungry. Oh, I’ve had enough of this life of continual fear, I’ve had enough of being hunted like an animal. I’ll give myself up. And what if I do? When you first looked at me with your startled eyes the day you accosted me in that bar, didn’t you think you’d found a virtuous one? You picked up a filthy tart, my dear. And you know, it’s no good trying to clean it off, it sticks with you forever, comes back like an oil stain on a dress. And anyway, when all’s said and done what’s that to me? Neither father nor mother nor good health, that’s called good luck when you do what I do.’

Marthe ends hurriedly, anticlimactically even. It is not a perfect work by any means, Goncourt criticised Huysmans for sometimes using flashy language or archaisms and in doing so killing a scene. It’s a fair criticism, as is Zola’s comment that the tone overall could in places usefully be lighter. But fair also are Goncourt and Zola’s respective compliments, that Huysmans is exceptional at bringing small scenes to vivid life, the daily routine of Léo and Marthe when they live together, a description of a wineseller, Marthe’s memories of her time within the brothel. This is a small book, almost a novella, and it is not perfect, but it contains many rewards and having read it my affection for Huysmans as a writer is if anything enhanced. I look forward to further of Mr King’s translations, and hope he has many more of them in him.

Marthe. I have linked, of course, to the Dedalus edition. The link is worth clicking for the marvellous and wholly apposite cover, a Degas painting, alone.

Haven’t we all, at some time or another, washed out a shirt in the sink?

Alan Furst is a critically regarded, but not I think well known, writer of espionage novels set in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. His best known point of comparison would be John Le Carre, and for those lacking patience to read further it’s fair to say that if you have a fondness for Le Carre you will likely enjoy Furst, and if not, likely not. Graham Greene is also plainly a strong influence on Furst’s work, as is Joseph Roth and Joseph Conrad (I’m told, I’ve not yet read Conrad).

The Polish Officer then is the third in a loosely linked series of novels set in wartime Europe. The novels are connected in that characters in one work may appear in others and in certain locations appearing in each. They also share a consistent focus on historical accuracy, realism and a certain bleak tone in keeping with this frankly rather bleak period. I have previously read Dark Star, second of the sequence, but not Night Soldiers, the first. As best I can tell, there is no consequence to the order in which the novels are read, though knowing now there is a sequence I shall likely follow it.

The Polish Officer opens with the German invasion of Poland, and with local intelligence officers pressed by necessity into service quite out of line with their training and work to date. One, a cartographer of minor aristocratic descent by the name of de Milja, becomes an active agent responsible for a number of operations which the book details – some successful, some not. A sense of fatalism is pervasive, soldiers and spies both are routinely sent on missions near certain to kill them, but continue from patriotism, from a desire for revenge or simply from a lack of better alternative. As matters open, de Milja must smuggle Poland’s gold reserves out of the country by train so as to ensure the government in exile remains in funds:

There were two people waiting for de Milja under the Dimek Street bridge: his former commander, a white-moustached major of impeccable manners and impeccable stupidity, serving out his time until retirement while his assistant did all the work, and de Milja’s former aide, Sublieutenant Nowak, who would serve as his adjutant on the journey south.
The major shook de Milja’s hand hard, his voice taught with emotion. ‘I know you’ll do well,’ he said. ‘As for me, I am returning to my unit. They are holding a line for me at the Bzura river.’ It was a death sentence and they both knew it. ‘Good luck sir,’ de Milja said, and saluted formally. The major returned the salute and disappeared onto a crowd of people on the train.

The book traces de Miljas career as a spy, in a period covering the first two or three years of the war, in which the German advance seemed unstoppable and country after country fall before their forces. Furst is tremendous at capturing the spirit of the time, most of all the fact now often forgotten that in this period victory for the allies did not look at all certain. With hindsight today, we tend to picture the second world war as a struggle against tyranny and extraordinary human evil. A war hard fought, but in which good finally triumphed. Furst’s novel has none of that sentiment, that moral reassurance, the war here is viciously fought, victory looks extremely doubtful and men and women both die fighting a foe which seems quite overwhelming.

Along with de Milja, we spend time in occupied Warsaw and Paris, we see London briefly and we see the frozen forests of the Ukraine as the Germans finally invade Russia, in the closing section of the novel. After that point of course, German invincibility was exposed as a myth and the tone of the war changed, after that point then is outside the scope of this novel which is about the fight before the anticipation of success.

Furst is excellent on the realities of life under occupation, the knocks on the door, the risk of looking the wrong way at the wrong person, the fear of reprisals for acts against the occupiers. The Germans plan to reduce the Poles to a slave race, intelligence gathered shows that the Poles are seen as undermen, subhumans who in future will have no need of traits such as literacy or speech beyond the grunt. Morale is maintained by missions in which Polish resistance officers fake leaflet drops from British aircraft promising British support coming soon to save Poland, although they know that no such planes or support are underway. Jokes speak of how pessimists learn German, optimists English and realists Russian. Returning from a brief trip to Romania:

On the train back to Warsaw he made a mistake.
…
A uniformed NKVD guard looked through his documents, reading with a slow index finger on each word, then handed them back silently. He got out of Rovno on a dawn train to Brzesc, near the east bank of the river that formed the dividing line between Russian and German occupation forces. On the train, two men in overcoats; one of them stared at him and, foolishly, he stared back. Then realised what he’d done and looked away. At the very last instant. He could see from the posture of the man – his age, his build – that he was somebody, likely civilian NKVD, and was about to make a point of it.
[The Russian has to leave the train, decides to get back on but is pulled away by his companion who doesn't want to waste time.]
From the corner of his eye, de Milja could see the Russian as he glanced back one last time. He was red in the face. The man, de Milja knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, had intended to kill him.

De Milja’s missions are often remarkably prosaic, much time is spent on painstaking preparation, the leaflet drop mentioned above needing a plane, a pilot, a printer, each of which must be sourced and the obtaining of any of which could lead to betrayal and death for all concerned. Those captured are interrogated, tortured, always eventually tell all they know and always eventually are executed. Those who betray the resistance, or who are suspected of it, face little better fate being executed with bullets to the head under railway bridges, the passing trains masking the noise.

De Milja pays for discarded oily rags, to assess the quality of oil being issued to German armoured troops, for information on wool weight, to see if heavier coats are being made, this intelligence together revealing whether an invasion of Russia is planned. Much of de Milja’s work is focused on the seemingly prosaic:

Fedin shrugged. War was logistics. You got your infantry extra socks, they marched another thirty miles.

As the novel continues, de Milja is moved to occupied Paris, where he spies on barge movements to learn about plans to invade Britain, creates a network of radio-telegraph operators who risk capture each time they communicate with London, the Germans having their own technicians who listen for such broadcasts and use their own techniques for locating the broadcast source if it continues too long. De Milja becomes involved in direct operations against the planned invasion, Operation Sealion, he recruits local patriots or the merely disgruntled and most of them do not survive.

Again, Furst’s eye for life in an occupied city is tremendous, absurdities such as the German insistence that Paris be open for business so that it’s troops can be sent there as a reward for active service, restaurants and bars serving the conquerors, affairs between people who are not suited to each other but who are at least alive and available. All this is brought out, people scheme, hide, profit, collude and resist and during it all the German advance continues. Vehicles destroyed quickly repaired, men killed quickly replaced, British resistance looking surely doomed.

The Polish Officer is rich then in its sense of time, of place, of the realities of resistance and the terrible choices forced upon people in times of war. Where it is perhaps less strong is in its characterisation, we see de Milja’s relationship with his mentally ill wife, with his father, with women he becomes involved with and fellow operatives he works alongside, but I at least did not get a deep sense of de Milja himself. He is portrayed as an intelligent man, deeply fatalistic and fully expecting not to survive the war, fighting because that is all that is left to do, and because he is good at what he does and has not died yet. It is a convincing portrait, but it lacks the subtlety of depiction that I found in Dark Star whose protagonist Andre Szara – a Pravda journalist – is a much more interesting and complex individual. De Milja is in a sense a vehicle through which we visit the past, his own personality often intentionally suppressed while he assumes the identities of others, but also I think suppressed so that the reader can better experience directly the world de Milja inhabits.

On the terrace of the Dragomir Niculescu restaurant, a man at leisure -or perhaps he simply has no place to go. A respectable gentleman, one would have to say. The suit not new of course. The shirt a particular colour, like wheat meal, that comes from washing in the sink and drying on a radiator. The posture proud, but maybe, if you looked carefully, just a little lost. Not defeated, nothing that drastic. Haven’t we all had a moment of difficulty, a temporary reversal? Haven’t we all, at some time or another, washed out a shirt in the sink?

Ultimately, this is an intelligent and rewarding work by an author fully conversant with his material and with a genuine knack for communicating fear, tension and the the small details of the world he has chosen to write about. Warsaw, Paris, London, the Ukraine, all convince, Furst knows his period and knows the war and although I did not enjoy The Polish Officer quite as much as I did Dark Star it was nonetheless definitely a rewarding read and I fully intend to read others by him.

The Polish Officer. Unfortunately, the current covers are rather bland, following a recent publishing trend to show shadowy figures in fog bound Central European landscapes, making a vast array of diverse books all look like they are much of a muchness. A shame, but if the cover fails to persuade, at least the contents do.