The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. T
The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.
The 4th novel by the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize.
From the Nobel Citation
Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise (1994), his breakthrough as a writer, evolved from a research trip to East Africa around 1990. The novel has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness. But it is also a coming of age account and a sad love story in which different worlds and belief systems collide. We are given a retelling of the Quran’s story of Joseph, against the background of a violent and detailed description of the colonisation of East Africa in the late 19th century. In a reversal of the Quran story’s optimistic ending, where Joseph is rewarded for the strength of his faith, Gurnah’s Yusuf feels forced to abandon Amina, the woman he loves, to join the German army he had previously despised. It is characteristic of Gurnah to frustrate the reader’s expectations of a happy ending, or an ending conforming to genre.”
The novel was shorlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994
The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004 and I first read this book in 2005, before revisiting in 2021 after the Nobel award.
And I would have to say that on both readings I did not really enjoy this book which I found one of the author’s weakest.
The novel is set in East Africa (in what becomes Tanzania) and perhaps can be seen as a story of the pre World War I years as the colonial “Scramble for Africa” starts to impact.
The main protagonist – albeit one who is, until late in the book, better described as the main characters – is Yusuf. At the book’s start he is told by his family to travel (to the coast) with a merchant and trader “Uncle Aziz” (master or “seyyid”)– quickly realising that he has been effectively sold to pay off his father’s debts.
The start and then end of the story are in the coastal town – Yusuf works in the merchant’s store as an understudy to Khalil (whose service to the merchant comes from a similar predicament). Yusuf is intrigued by the merchant’s rather mysterious wife “the mistress”.
The rest of the book – which feels like something of a different book altogether, has Yusuf accompanying Aziz on his trading travels – first to a town where he stays with a trader who is one of Aziz’s junior partners and then on a long, complex and difficult trading journey with Aziz and his fiery overseers, into the heart of the continent.
This journey feels like it should be the true heart of the novel and of real historical interest – as an evocative portrayal of an Africa society on the verge of change – a mainly Muslim area ruled by superstition and mysticism and riven by strange tribes, but as the Europeans gradually exert their power on the continent and the land turns increasingly violent and corrupt. But while much of that is there – at least on a sentence by sentence level – I never really felt engaged by the story of the journey (despite the wide range of characters and incidents) or really enlightened into the history of the area beyond the simple summary in my previous paragraph.
The novel then returns to the original, rather separate, story in the merchant’s coastal home and takes a rather odd turn. The mistress – who suffers from some kind of facial blemish – is convinced that Yusuf has magical powers that can save her – possibly even by sleeping with her. To Khalil’s horror Yusuf becomes more and more reckless in indulging her fantasies – principally so he can see the mistress’s maid – Khalil’s step-sister Amina (adopted by Khalil’s family after being rescued by slavers, only them to be sold by her adopted parents as a child bride to pay their debts).
This culminates in a retelling of the Quaranic version of the Joseph/Potiphar story – and as the Nobel citation implies, Yusuf though rather than being rewarded for his fidelity is more expected to remain in servitude in exchange for not being punished and on a whim decides to join the German army.
The most interesting part of this story is that Gurnah effectively then uses Yusuf’s fate as the back story for one of his key characters in his latest novel “Afterlives” – and overall I would recommend that novel as a much better example of Gurnah’s Africa based writing.
I have revisited this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookse Madness challenge.
I first read it in 2005 for my Book Group as part of what was (II have revisited this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookse Madness challenge.
I first read it in 2005 for my Book Group as part of what was (I thought) a rather well chosen double selection alongside Zoë Heller's What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal . In fact those two books were the first I read in 2005.
Both are set in schools and both I think have at their heart vicarious living.
Of the two I have to say that at the time I much preferred Heller's book and it is also, 13 years later, the one that stays far more in my mind.
My very brief original review from 2005 (in those days my reviews were purely for myself - to note the plot of the book and my overall impression).
Set in 1930’s – a very short book about an eccentric teacher Jean Brodie (one, so the narrator – one of her girls – points out of a generation of educated ladies who lost their partners 15-20 years ago in the First World War and who are now on a moral quest).
Jean Brodie is unusual in that she is a Junior school teacher and decides to mentor a select group of pupils – her girls, giving them a broad education and also confiding in them while explaining to them all along that she is “in her prime”.
Gradually she begins to life vicariously through to of them – Rose and Sandy, the narrator.
The book is told from the viewpoint from one of her set – who eventually “betrays” her (by mentioning her facist leanings) to a headmaster and teaching staff who have continually been looking for ways to get rid of her.
Found book reasonably interesting and the character of Jean Brodie a reasonably engaging one – but seemed too short to be really compelling....more
I read this book in 2005 and revisited it for the 2019 Mookse Madness as Ian McEwen is one of the featured authors.
My 2005 review
Story about a neurosuI read this book in 2005 and revisited it for the 2019 Mookse Madness as Ian McEwen is one of the featured authors.
My 2005 review
Story about a neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and one day in his life - the day of the anti-war protests in February 2003 which form both a background to the story and an undercurrent to his thoughts.
The day starts with Henry unable to sleep and spotting a plane on fire - he assumes (wrongly) it is some form of terrorist attack and his mind is troubled all day. On his way to a squash match he collides with a car containing Baxter (a street fighter) and two associates. Henry realises Baxter is suffering from the early stages of Huntingdon's and manages to distract him enough to avoid a beating.
Later Henry goes home to his wife (a libel lawyer for a newspaper) and son (an upcoming blues musician) for the homecoming and hoped reconciliation of his daughter (an about to be published poet) and his father-in-law (a famous poet). Baxter enters the house threatening them with a knife but eventually they overcome him (rather bizarrely with the help of some poetry which dramatically changes his mood) and he suffers brain damage. Henry then operates to save Baxter’s life. During the drama he realises that his daughter is pregnant.
Clearly the work of a literary author but not as striking or impressive as "Atonement".
Some lovely similes - e.g. when London is described as a coral reef.
I also enjoyed the part at the end when Henry reflects on the future and things he inevitably knows he will have to face – e.g. the death of his mother, growing distant from his kids.
Bravely McEwan made Henry either ambivalent or pro the attack on Iraq unlike almost all the other characters and ready to articulate the moral dilemmas but relieved not to have to decide them.
Another interesting feature is that Henry is fundamentally happy with a good marriage, a challenging and enjoyable job, a fantastic house and two talented kids.
Extensive descriptions of a squash game, of neurosurgery, of cooking fish, of literature debates with his daughter and of blues. I found these unsatisfactory - in areas I knew little about I found them almost impossible to follow and not at all designed to induce either understanding or sympathy/interest. Sometimes this felt like padding to make a whole day last a book....more
The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a dispRevisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The book opens with the murder of Max Ophuls – a WWII Resistance hero from Strasbourg (itself a disputed territory fought over between Germans and French and so analogous to Kashmir), turned maker of many of the institutions of the modern world, turned initially popular ambassador to India turned America’s counter-terrorism chief. He is assassinated by his Kashmiri Muslim driver – a mysterious character called Shalimar the Clown.
The book tells the story of Max, Max’s wife (a WWII secret agent), Shalimar, India (Max’s daughter) and Boonyi – a Hindu from a Kashmiri village. Boonyi is a great dancer and Shalimar a trapeze artist. The village gains fame for its combination of folk theatre/circus (run by Shalimar’s Muslim Dad) and feasts (run by Boonyi’s Pashun – Hindu- Dad) – the village combining the two takes away the feast trade from a nearby mainly Muslim village which is much later the cause of much trouble and tension. Shalimar and Boonyi fall in love and are betrayed – but their village’s famed tolerance means that the union is blessed.
However fault lines begin to emerge – the tolerance of the village becomes harder to maintain as increasingly militant Muslim’s enter the area. Max – a serial philanderer – falls for Boonyi and it is his downfall. Firstly he develops an obsession with Kashmir – then when their affair ends in Boonyi’s pregnancy – just at the time when America’s position in the world is being undone by Vietnam, he is forced to resign by the scandal. The baby is adopted by Max’s wife and renamed from Kashmira to India - and Boonyi returns to her village where she finds that the villagers having officially registered her dead refuse to acknowledge her.
Shalimar vowing a long-term revenge becomes involved in terrorism – initially Kashmir militants but then the Taliban and Al-Qaeda all the time pursuing his own long-term plan of revenge.
After murdering both Boonyi (only after both their parents die) and then Max he pursues India who instead kills him.
The book (as often with Rushdie) is over-packed with allusion – each character seems simply a cipher.
Ultimately the book although at heart a love story is dominated by despair and the descent of both the beautiful valley of Kashmir but also the world into violence and terror (with the book particularly influenced by the post 9/11 world). . Despite this I found the book by far the easiest of Rushdie’s books to read (language is less tortured and magic realism is more measured) and easily (at the time of publication) his best book since Midnight’s children....more
Yes but then you took my father’s name. Doesn’t that make us related? And we are in a strange land. That would more or less naturally make us relat
Yes but then you took my father’s name. Doesn’t that make us related? And we are in a strange land. That would more or less naturally make us related, or so people tell me when they ring to ask me for a favour. You still haven’t told me about that, why you took his name. It’s all history, anyway. None of it matters, really. I’m not saying that history does not matter, knowing about what happened so we understand what we are all about, and how we came to be what we are, and what stories we tell about it all. I mean I don’t want recriminations, all this family business, all this muttering that stretches back all the time ……… Have you noticed the incredible consequence of family squabbles in the history of Islamic societies.
The 6th novel by the 2021 Nobel Prize Literature winner
From the Nobel Citation
In Gurnah’s treatment of the refugee experience, focus is on identity and self-image, apparent not least in Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001). In both these first-person novels silence is presented as the refugee’s strategy to shield his identity from racism and prejudice, but also as a means of avoiding a collision between past and present, producing disappointment and disastrous self-deception.
In By the Sea, another drama of disappointment and self-deception ensues. Saleh, the narrator of the first part, is an old Muslim from Zanzibar applying for asylum in England with a visa forged in the name of a bitter enemy. When he meets the enemy’s son, Latif, the narrator of the book’s second part, it is only because Latif has coincidentally been delegated to help Saleh adjust to his new home country. In their impassioned quarrels, Saleh’s suppressed past in Zanzibar rears up within him. But where Saleh despite all tries to remember, Latif does everything to forget. It creates a peculiar tension in the novel, where the choice of two narrators dissolves the fiction’s plotted path and direction, as well as the narrators’ authority and self-perception.
The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 and I first read this book in 2005, before revisiting in 2021 after the Nobel award.
The book starts with a melancholy air – the first party narrator (who we later find is called Saleh) is living in England at the age of around 65, in either (I think) 1995 or 1996 in a small, unnamed, town by the sea, having arrived from Zanzibar several months earlier a Gatwick Airport where he claimed asylum (in full knowledge that the British government had decided to allow asylum to anyone from the Islands – and possibly wider Tanzania – who claimed their life was in danger).
The narrator has been advised by those who helped his trip that he should stay largely silent and pretend not to speak English, and is travelling under what we also know is a false name – Rajab Shaaban (“not my real name, but a name I borrowed for the occasion of the life saving trip. It belonged to someone I knew for many years”) with his only real possession a mahogany casket filled with expensive incense.
The not speaking English is important to Gurnah’s writing as he himself of course famously writes his anti-colonial tales in the colonial language – but one that he says was invented by the British but now available to the world – and, as himself a (recently retired) Professor Of English and Post Colonial Literature he enjoys in his novels having characters from Zanzibar more familiar with the English literary canon than those they meet in England – here the narrator when finally admitting his deception and asked why he does not speak English says he “preferred not to” – a deliberate allusion to Herman Melville’s short story “Bartelby the Scrivener” which plays an important role in the novel.
The casket is confiscated by the immigration authorities, ostensibly for testing, but there is a clear symbolic link with the colonial powers taking for themselves the most beautiful artefacts of their former possessions, a recurrent theme in Gurnah’s writing and also as we find integral to the narrator’s occupation in his earlier life (as he had been an antique dealer whose main business was selling local artefacts to the colonial authorities or cruise ship passengers).
The casket acts in a second symbolic way – in what a contemporary Guardian review called “a pandora’s box of memories” – opening it starts the first in a revelatory series of stories (about the past – storytelling about the past in Zanzibar by characters now in exile in England being one of Gurnah’s key themes.
In this case the stories are fully bound up with a second key character in the novel – Latif, a Literary Professor himself, who is contacted by the immigration authorities when they think that the a translator is needed for the asylum seeker. When he is told that this is no longer needed – he both recognises the “Bartelby” reference and the name that the asylum seeker is using – as it is the name of his own Father (who he has not seen since fleeing to the UK from the GDR – where he was on a Dentistry training course from Zanzibar) some thirty years earlier. He immediately recognises that the only person who would use that name is someone he regards as a family enemy – Saleh Omar.
What unfolds from there is a series of inter-related stories.
It starts with Saleh’s story of how he came upon the incense – from a visiting Omani entrepreneur Hussein (note that one of the book’s great strengths is how it conveys the importance to the Islands of the trade winds that permitted triangular trade between Oman, Zanzibar and India – making Zanzibar the gateway to the East African Coast – but how Hussein was tied up with Latif’s family (with who he lodged) both via a seeming infatuation with Latif’s older brother Hassan and a dubious series of financial transactions with his drunkard Father Rajab Shaaban. Those transactions then, via further dubious machinations on Hussein’s behalf, later enmesh Saleh and his affairs with those of Rajab Shaaban with who he already has some inheritance complications and bad blood.
We then hear both of how Latif came to England and of how Latif has seen the same historical incidents and what he sees as Saleh’s double betrayal of his family, before hearing again from Saleh on what he believes to be the true story showing why in fact it is he who feels grievously wronged by Latif’s parents to an extent which goes way beyond inheritance or financial disputes. And even then some of Latif’s memories cast doubts a little on both versions.
There are a couple of related issues with the stories and the novel itself I think.
The stories are told indirectly – the effect is that the reader can feel strangely distanced from them with a lack of real immersion and there can be too much of a feel of “tell not show” which lessens the impact of the stories themselves (albeit some of the details – particularly of what happens to Saleh later in Zanzibar – are themselves hugely shocking).
And the stories themselves can be both complex and digressive: the stories of the different property disputes and family relations between the two families are difficult to really appreciate; while for example when Latif is telling of his trip to the GDR we learn first of a rather bizarre encounter with a penpal followed by the penpal’s mother’s family and their time in Kenya (none of which detail is at best more than tangential/incidental to the main narrative). In my original review I captured this by saying that the effect is somewhat like going to someone else's family, school or work reunion and that the writing style is very elegant however but the difficult to follow (or almost care about) detail makes it a less engrossing read than it otherwise would be.
But again a very interesting addition to the author’s works and one which in contrast to Bartleby sets out the importance of empathy and of understanding the refugee’s need for silence and the importance of stories no matter how hard they may be.
I have never thought of Bartelby like that [someone dangerous, someone capable of small susatined cruelties on himself and others weaker than himself] although he was cruel to himself, that was true. “Perhaps in these times you have come to see people who choose humility and withdrawal as duplicitous” I said “ To see them as damaged beyond redemption ……. Perhaps you have less tolerance for that desire which faith in a spirit’s ambition made heroic. So the kind of self-mortifying retreat Bartleby undertakes only has meaning as a dangerous unpredictability. Especially since this story does not allow us to know what has bought Bartleby to this condition, does not allow us to have sympathy for him … The story only gives us this man, who says nothing about himself or his past”
A book I first read in 2005 alongside Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" - the two books were my first read of 2005 and were a double bookA book I first read in 2005 alongside Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" - the two books were my first read of 2005 and were a double book group selection - both set in schools and both looking at vicarious living.
Of the two I have to say I much preferred this book to Spark's classic. I revisited both books due to Spark's book being part of the 2019 Mookes Madness Challenge.
Book is notes made by one teacher Barbara, about an affair between another teacher – Sheba (named after Bathsheba – presumably some form of biblical allusion?) and a 15-year-old pupil called Connolly. Notes were written after the event – when affair has been discovered and Sheba (by now the subject of tabloid notoriety) has been forced out of her home and is soon due to face trial.
Book is much more about Barbara – about her need for any form of meaningful relationship and her desire if she finds such a relationship to completely control it as well as her almost insane jealousy (her main problem with the affair is that it diverts Sheba’s attention from her). She allows Sheba’s secret to leak out to another teacher who then reports her – and then is the only one to stand by Sheba – which finally leaves her (secretly triumphantly) in the position she wants – of another human being fundamentally depending on her.
Very gripping, dark story – particularly clever in the way that the reader gradually realises Barbara’s true character and motivation as well as in the way that many of the themes (see below) are actually much more about Barbara than (as would seem more obvious) Sheba/Connolly.
Ultimately a book about obsession and the need for a control in a relationship....more
'And over here, we've got Norfolk. Very nice there …………. You see, because it's stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's n
'And over here, we've got Norfolk. Very nice there …………. You see, because it's stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south … they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner'
With thanks to Faber and Faber for an NetGalley ARC of the new edition - I read this in February 2021 as preparation for the publication of "Klara and the Sun".
From a pre-publication Guardian interview for that book
The book revisits many of the ideas behind Never Let Me Go, his 2005 novel about three teenage clones whose organs will be harvested, leading to certain death before their 30s: “only a slight exaggeration of the human condition, we all have to get ill and die at some point”, he says now. Both novels hold out the possibility that death can be postponed or defeated by true love, which must be tested and proved in some way; a fairytale bargaining that is also made explicit in the boatman’s challenge to Axl and Beatrice in his previous novel The Buried Giant. This hope, even for those who don’t believe in an afterlife, “is one of the things that makes us human,” he reflects. “It perhaps makes us fools as well. Perhaps it is a lot of sentimental hogwash. But it is very powerful in people.”
He is unapologetic about repetition, citing the “continuity” of great film directors (he is a huge cinephile), and likes to claim that each of his first three books was essentially a rewrite of its predecessor. “Literary novelists are slightly defensive about being repetitive,” he says. “I think it is perfectly justified: you keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” He gets away with it, he says, by changing location or genre: “People are so literal they think I’m moving on.” For him, genre is like travel, and it is true that he has enjoyed genre-hopping: When We Were Orphans (detective fiction); Remains of the Day (period drama); The Unconsoled (Kafkaesque fable); Never Let Me Go (dystopian sci-fi) and The Buried Giant (Tolkienish fantasy). Now, as the title Klara and the Sun hints, he visits what he calls “children’s storyland”. But be warned, we are still very much in Ishiguroland.
ORIGINAL REVIEW 2005
Story narrated by Kath – a “carer” looking after “donors”. Kath and the donors are clones – specially bred for organ donation – each donor goes through a series of donations – and normally complete (die) by the third or fourth donation. Kath looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, her time as a young adult in the cottages and then her time as her carer – and through it all her three-part relationship with Ruth and Tommy.
The style is very distinctive – reminiscent but often having to explain something else in order to get to the main point. Kath and the others “donors” are very sensitive to each other – to nuance and whether they have upset others.
Like The Time Traveler's Wife (but completely unlike My Sister's Keeper) this book isn’t really about its obvious subject – in this case cloning. Instead it is about: childhood and innocence – the donors were sheltered from their ultimate fate – they were often told things before they were old enough to properly understand so by the time they did understand the full implications of part of their fate it was something they already knew and had accepted deep down. The book is in some ways in a similar style – there is no dramatic revelation rather it becomes obvious what is happening. The donors retain their innocence – despite the fact they are having sex with each other – they see the outside world as a thing of danger and wonder (discussing what they might be when they are older – even though they are already young adults and even though they know in one sense that they will never be anything).
Also about passive acceptance of status – no-one appears to force the clones into their life (in fact it is not even clear that they can be identified in any way) but they accept their fate with their ambitions being limited to postponing their final death.
An easy and enjoyable book to read but perhaps not as deep or thought provoking as one might think (which is both good and bad)....more
Smith’s third novel after the excellent White Teeth and disappointing The Autograph Man – definitely a return to form. As always with Review from 2005
Smith’s third novel after the excellent White Teeth and disappointing The Autograph Man – definitely a return to form. As always with Smith huge cast of characters, but based mainly around two families (the Belsey's and the Kipps).
Story has many main themes: a very explicit homage to “Howard’s End” (first line – “One may as well begin with…”, main character and many elements of plot); meditations on beauty (both in Howard’s academic study which seeks to deconstruct and challenge traditional concepts of beauty and great art as well as in some of the characters – Kiki’s hugeness, Victoria’s stunning beauty, Carl’s attractiveness); racial identity (particularly for middle class blacks – the disputes between Monty and Howard over affirmative action; Levi’s faux-radicalness, Carl’s eventual disgust with the Kipps and Belsey families); academia; youthful naivety (Zora is seemingly an autobiographical character).
Not perfect book but ultimately very gripping and involving – not from the plot but simply from the development of the characters. Part where Howard visits and clashes with his working class father (still mourning death of his mother and in Howard’s eyes prejudiced) is probably the best scene in the book together. Other good pieces are parts where the family turn on Howard for his ability to enjoy anything as well as the piece when we join Claire for her reflections on why she had the affair....more
The current Windrush scandal / national embarrassment caused me to revisit my review of this book - as the Windrush is crucial to the plot and the autThe current Windrush scandal / national embarrassment caused me to revisit my review of this book - as the Windrush is crucial to the plot and the author's own parents sailed to England on the Windrush in 1948.
Multi-narrator story – which also moves between the past of the various characters and a present narrative in 1948 that brings them all together about:
Gilbert Joseph – a Jamaican who joins the RAF, but finds himself restricted to being a driver. In Jamaica he raises funds from Hortense to travel to London as a civilian (in exchange for marrying her and agreeing for her to come and join him). As a serviceman he found he was treated much better by the English than either in America or by the white GI’s in London, but as a civilian he realises he has gone back to being a second class citizen and increasingly refuses to submit to prejudice.
Hortense – desperate to escape Jamaica but shocked at the reality of London – both how shabby and decrepit it is as well as how she is seen as inferior due to her colour despite her superior speech, knowledge and training.
Queenie Bligh – When her husband goes off to war she looks after his shell shocked father and meets Gilbert when he returns him after he has wandered. Going to the cinema with Gilbert they provoke a race riot among GIs and Arthur is shot. Seemingly widowed at end of war she takes in coloured ex-serviceman when Gilbert looks her up when he can’t find lodgings anywhere else.
Bernard – her husband, who goes off to fight in the war. Parts when he is in India are a poor attempt at Salman Rushdie style writing (without magic realism) and least convincing and enjoyable. When he returns he is shocked that Queenie has black lodgers.
Very enjoyable book – lightly written but engaging read and convincing portrait of all four main characters (possibly least of all Hortense who is almost ridiculously naïve about the racism in England). The plot twist at end is unconvincing and unnecessary.
Much more interesting and nuanced portrayal of racism and beginning of multi-racial society in England than A Lesson Before Dying which I read immediately before it....more
Long and extremely complex novel – very hard to categorise and incredibly wide-ranging and ambitious.
Womanising astronomer Max Delius REVIEW FROM 2005
Long and extremely complex novel – very hard to categorise and incredibly wide-ranging and ambitious.
Womanising astronomer Max Delius (son of a Nazi collaborator who had his Jewish wife – Max’s mother – killed: note this is almost autobiographical as Mulisch had a Jewish maternal family killed in camps and a collaborator father) meets by chance with absent-minded linguist Onno Quist (son of an ex-Prime Minister) and the two strike up a deep almost exclusive friendship, which they only open to musician Ada Brons. Ada has a child actually by Max (having had a relationship first with Max and then Onno) although all characters believe it is probably by Onno. When Ada is put into an irreversible coma in a car crash, Max is seduced by her mother Sophia and racked with guilt that he might be the child’s natural father – he proposes successfully that the two of them bring up the child. Max is eventually killed by an asteroid when he realises an apparent error in astronomical data and further the errors which mean special relativity and quantum mechanics breakdown in the fraction of a time after the big bang could in fact be explained by another body - (the implication is) heaven.
What seems like chance to the characters – most particularly the meeting of Max and Onno is in fact carefully choreographed by unnamed beings – the implication is that they are angels – one more junior and the other very senior. Through their discussions we find that humanity via Francis Bacon made a pact with the devil – in which he gave them scientific progress. Gradually they have taken on most of the powers of God and his angels – the last remaining area being the ability to create life itself, which, with the decoding of DNA underway, is imminent. Accordingly (and this only really emerges in the later stages) God has decided to remove the 10 Commandments from earth and take them back to heaven and then leave earth to its own devices.
Max/Onno have a remarkable friendship – they seem to believe they are “super-men” and spark each other in many forms of religious/political/moral/philosophical musings, including a trip to Cuba to watch Ada play in a cultural programme where they accidentally become delegates at a international subversive/terrorist conference (this conference eventually costs Onno his place in a coalition government years later as well as being where Quentin is conceived).
The part where Quentin grows up with Max/Sophia in an eclectic mix of characters in a set of flats built into an old castle is the hardest to follow and least enjoyable – I found it hard to differentiate the characters or understand the many artistic musings. Onno goes into hiding when his political career is ruined and Max then dies and Quentin decides to seek out Onno.
Last part of the book is the quest of Ouentin firstly to find his father and then to locate a mysterious Citadel he sees in his dreams. While exploring Rome he concludes that the ten commandments were not in fact lost but were removed from the temple at Jerusalem by the Romans and then stored in a church in Rome. He then locates the two tablets and returns them to Jerusalem. Part contains much on history of church, architecture of Rome and Jerusalem but is interesting.
REVIEW FROM 2008
The book is compelling and in fact at times breathtaking in its sheer scope and bewildering array of ideas (the only criticism that can be made is that in presenting Onno, Max and Quentin’s intellect as beyond normal – a fact confirmed by the “angels” – he is effectively crediting himself – the real author of their ideas – with the same genius).
This time around the castle part although still a little disorientating is important as the cast of characters there gives Quentin the essential education he needs (art history, languages, architecture, archaeology, even lock picking) both to envisage and complete his task.
In retrospect having heard Mulisch speak on Siegfried, the theme of the holocaust but beyond that and very specifically the person of Hitler is ever present in the book.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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