Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“THE BOOK OF GUILT” by Catherine Chidgey (Published by Te Herenga Waka, $NZ 38) 

                                      The New Zealand Cover for "The Book of Guilt"

            England in the 1970s – but it’s a dystopian version of England. The Second World War finished when Britain made a deal with Germany after Hitler was assassinated, Germany was allowed to keep the territories it had conquered and England was not invaded. In England, a certain Dr. Roach is regarded as an expert in medicine and health. With  the approval of the government he has set up a series of Sycamore schools in remote areas away from towns, some for boys and some for girls, where they are taught ethics and cleanliness and healthy sports and are told about some science and a very patriotic version of history with only one set of books, known as The Book of Knowledge, to teach them. Dr. Roach regularly visits Sycamore Homes to check how they are getting on. In one of the Sycamore schools, a boy called Vincent tells us in the first person of his experience. He is one of a set of triplets – Vincent, Lawrence and William – and they are looked after by women, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. They are the only parents the boys know.  They are reaching the age of adolescence and Vincent is beginning to question things. Such as why have other boys disappeared? And why he, Lawrence and William are the only boys still living in the school? And when are they going to visit Margate where, they are told, they will have a whale of a time? And why are they separated from girls? Girls have to be called “young ladies” and are kept in other institutions except on special days when they can fraternise with the boys under supervision. Vincent, Lawrence and William may be triplets, but they have slightly different temperaments – Vincent is more likely to question things, Lawrence is a little bit of a pedant and is afraid of going against the rules, and William likes fun and games and sometimes breaks the rules. But on the whole they are normal boys who get on together.

            Vincent’s first-person narrative dominates most of the novel, but there are two other characters who speak in the first person. One is a young girl, Nancy, who is beginning to wonder why her parents always keep her indoors and won’t allow her to meet other people. The other is a member of parliament, a woman dubbed The Minister of Loneliness, who is beginning to have doubts about the real nature of the Sycamore schools while her boss, the Prime Minister, is mainly interested in saving money and therefore shutting down the Sycamore schools.

                                  The English cover for "The Book of Guilt"

            Among reviewers, only swine would give away all the twists and surprises of a new novel. [On my blog I am happy to give away whole plots only if I am dealing with old, well-known or classic novels.] Surprise is an important weapon for novelists, and I am not going to give away all the surprises. But I can say that it would have to be a very dull reader who did not understand, by a third of the way through The Book of Guilt, what the schools were really up to, viz, using boys [and girls] as human guinea-pigs in testing drugs, trying a sort of hypnosis by getting the boys to tell their dreams in the hope of finding out which of the boys could possibly become a delinquent, and weeding out and disposing those who were not perfect. And possibly [as I guessed early in the novel] that while the triplets are fully human beings, they had been cloned, that is, made artificially instead of being born the natural way. Much of this rings bells for me as I remember Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are cloned [not that the word “clone” was known in the 1930s when Huxley was writing] and where people who were not physically perfect could be eliminated. I should also note that towards the end of his novel, Huxley has a character who neatly explains how the whole system works. Catherine Chidgey also, late in the novel, has a character who explains how the whole system works. Then there is, in The Book of Guilt, a minor character who notes that without Dr. Mengele’s work many medical breakthroughs would not have happened.

            Chidgey makes it clear that her dystopian England is very influenced by Nazi ideas. But she also has other issues. One is the bigotry of “ordinary” people when they have to meet the cloned. This surely reminds us that every so often in [existing] England there are outbreaks of xenophobia. She drops in mentions of the type of TV programmes young Nancy likes to watch. One is Jim’ll Fixit, in which children were given all the things they had requested. This is a reference to the programme that, beginning in the 1970s, was hosted by Jimmy Savile but who, after his death, was revealed as a paedophile and predator who violated children. Maybe [I surmise] Chidgey was pointing out that children are often misled about what they think is good for them. There is clear reference to the Moors Murders - involving the murders of children. Then there is the complaisance of the general public who don’t really want to look into the flaw’s and rules of the country they live in. And Chidgey gives us a prime minister who seems awfully like Margaret Thatcher... wnich seems to be linked to the type of ultra-patriotic curriculum that is taught in the Sycamore Homes.  In some respects then, Chidgey is using satire to critique England as it is rather than critiquing a dystopian England.

 Catherine Chidgey now seems to be New Zealand’s best known and most widely read novelist. Her novel The Book of Guilt moves at a steady pace. She looks deeply into the psychology of her major characters but she also makes vivid her minor characters with their unique habits. Even if she deals with weighty things, she knows how to turn a tale and she moves her narrative to a surprising ending which I will not reveal.

I do not usually refer to what other reviewers have wrtten, but in this case I had a good look at what they said because the issues Chidgey raised are essential ones. Too many reviewers seemed to assume the novel is simply a warning against Nazi ideas which “could happen here”, so we should watch out for totalitarian states. Two of Chidgey’s novels The Wish Child and Remote Sympathy (both reviewed on this blog) are set in Nazi Germany and of course Chidgey deals with some of the horrors of the Nazi regime. But among many other things, she is concerned with how children are treated – or mis-treated. Even before the Holocaust was set in motion, the Nazis ruled that mentally-impaired people or people who were suffering chronic diseases were of no worth, could produce nothing and therefore they should be eliminated… “humanely” of course. Nazi doctors poisoned or suffocated people in gas vans. But this idea was not wholly invented by the Nazis. From the late 19^th century right up to the Second World War the idea of Eugenics flourished in much of the Western World, with the basic idea that only fit people should be allowed to give birth, others should be sterilised, with some advocating the elimination of unwanted people “humanely”.  Eugenics was not a small movement but was mainstream . It was embraced by many people in England (Marie Stopes and others), in America (Margaret Sanger – who was greatly admired by Hitler) and even in New Zealand where some of the founders of the Plunket Society were in favour of sterilising the poor and the weak. Nazis greatly expanded the ideas that had been promoted by the Eugenics movement.

Why do I go on at length about this? Because, at least in my view, far from being only a warning about totalitarian states, The Book of Guilt is also a warning about forms of Eugenics that are still with us. Your turn to tell me if I’m wrong about that.

 Footnote: The Book of Guilt was released first to an English audience. Only some months later was it marketed in New Zealand. Hence the two different front-covers. I understand that there was a third front-cover for Austrailan consumption, but I haven't been able to track it down.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“REMOTE SYMPATHY” by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University of Wellington Press,  $NZ35)

 

 

While I was reading Catherine Chidgey's new novel, I kept thinking of a classroom experience I had in the 1980s. I was teaching History to 6^th Formers (Year 12 in the new parlance) and we were studying Nazi Germany. Most of the class were girls. As part of the course, I showed them a documentary about the Shoah. They sat with little reaction through scenes, probably already familiar to them from other films, of ovens, gas chambers and emaciated corpses piled up in liberated death camps. But a couple of brief shots made all the girls gasp in horror. They were images of Nazi women who had served as guards in the concentration camps. I asked the girls why these shots upset them.  “Because women don’t do things like that,” they said.

Years later, on the internet, I came across photos of women happily frolicking at a sort of picnic with three men. They looked like perfectly ordinary people having a good time. The three men were SS officers. The women were voluntary auxiliary staff who helped them at Auschwitz, which was fully functioning a mile or two from where this happy photograph was taken. Given the right (or wrong) circumstances, women and men are capable of doing the most monstrous things, to the point of believing the most monstrous things are both necessary and normal. And the disturbing thing is that they look just like us. Indeed, in their complexity and contradictions, they are just like us, because they are human.

 

            From this fact, Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy does not draw some simplistic lesson about all of us being guilty. If everybody is guilty then nobody is guilty, concepts of right and wrong simply vanish and we can’t talk about good and evil. But she does understand that the guilty are human and as complex as anybody else. In her second novel to be set in Nazi Germany – after The Wish Child – she presents even an SS officer as a rounded and credible human being.

Remote Sympathy has three protagonists. Dr Lenard Weber, who perhaps has a few Jewish ancestors, has had to divorce his Jewish wife to maintain his position, but has ended up as a prisoner in Buchenwald anyway. SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn is one of the chief administrators of the concentration camp, keeping accounts. He lives with his wife Greta and their little son Karl-Heinz in one of the luxury houses provided for SS officers, just a short distance from the camp. Greta Hahn misses their former home in Munich and she has had to suppress the Catholicism in which she was raised because “the churches are the enemies of the Reich”. But she settles in comfortably enough, although she occasionally finds some things unsettling and unnerving. What exactly is her husband’s job?

These three voices narrate the novel. We are given the “imaginary diary” of Frau Greta Hahn. We hear Dr Weber’s experiences from letters he writes in 1946, and SS officer Dietrich Hahn’s experiences from a tape-recorded interview he does in 1954  (so we know from the start that the doctor and the SS man survive the war). Much that these three narrators say sounds nothing like a diary, letter or interview, but we easily accept this as a literary convention, like the epistolary convention of many authors since Samuel Richardson.

    It is never my intention to give away all the plot development of a new novel.The author has the right to expect her intended surprises to be real surprises for the reader too. But I can give the general situation which we come to know well before we are halfway through Remote Sympathy. When he was younger, Lenard Weber created a machine which he hoped would cure cancer without surgery and by electrotherapy -  electric waves would shake apart and destroy tumors. He has long since realised that his machine doesn’t work and is probably sheer quackery. But when cancer develops in Greta Hahn, her husband is desperate to find a cure, learns about the doctor’s machine and invites Weber into his home to treat his wife.  Knowing how useless his invention really is, Weber accepts, with his own survival in mind. As a prisoner in Buchenwald, he is thus given easier duties and limited preferential treatment, even as other prisoners are being worked, starved or beaten to death. And as the “treatment” continues, some level of sympathy and mutual understanding develops between the doctor and the SS officer’s wife, even if the doctor has to be cautious, subservient and circumspect in everything he says.

There are many ironies built into this novel, beyond the situation of the SS officer being in one sense dependent on the prisoner. There is the irony of Buchenwald, the concentration camp, being right next to Weimar, the centre of German liberal enlightenment and the home of Goethe. An old oak tree, believed to have sometimes shaded Goethe when he was writing, is now surrounded by Buchenwald, so a symbol of barbarism sits side-by-side with a symbol of high culture. Together with the voices of the three main characters, we sometimes hear the collective voices of the citizens of Weimar. Like Frau Miller and Frau Muller in The Wish Child, they are complacent and conformist, believing every propaganda slogan, reviling Germany’s enemies, and to the bitter end refusing to believe anything barbarous is going on in the camp up the hill. There is the ongoing irony of Greta Hahn, in the earlier stages of the novel, fussing over trivial domestic matters (windows smeared by people who hung the curtains; how her curtains are hung) while a stone’s throw away people are being systematically murdered. There are also incidental ironies like Dr Weber, early in his career, a man who regards human beings as mere circuitry of a machine like the famous Transparent Man, listening to one of his patients muttering scraps of hymns as he is being treated. A tension between religious belief and hard positivist materialism is one thread in this novel.

While the ironies always have point, the strength of the novel is the roundedness and credibility of its main characters. Both Greta Hahn and Lenard Weber develop slowly in their attitudes as they reach some sort of mutual understanding. It is no sudden and improbable meeting of minds.

Catherine Chidgey’s real skill in characterization is best illustrated by SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn. He is not one dimensional. He has real concern  about his wife’s health. He feels real sorrow as her cancer advances. In some sense he is a good father, making toy animals for his young son. But he is also an opportunist and self-evidently a liar who has perhaps come to believe his own lies. We understand how much he has absorbed Nazi doctrine when he takes to referring to the family’s Jehovah’s Wtiness “servant” Josef (i.e. prisoner forced to do domestic chores) as “Niemand” – “Nobody”. Enemies of the Reich are not to be treated as people.  In his interview, nine years after the war is over, he repeatedly emphasises his own probity in running the camp, claiming that he kept accounts honestly and never embezzled; claiming that he was under orders to save money, so it wasn’t his fault if prisoners starved to death for lack of food; claiming anything about prisoners being tortured or worked to death was the fault of his subordinates. In short, he is the model of Hannah Arendt’s Schreibtischtater (“desk murderer”) – the guy who gives the orders and then pleads that his own hands are clean. And even in the matters of stealing money and personally profiting from the camp, we know he is lying. He is the unreliable narrator who never considers how much he is really revealing.

What is being displayed – in Dietrich Hahn, in the wives of SS officers and often in the citizens of Weimar -  is wilful ignorance, choosing not to know things. Dietrich Hahn says “I was always mindful of the inmates basic needs… but like all the other officers, I preferred not to have to visit the compound unnecessarily; you risk seeing something or catching something.” (p.85)   Elsewhere, Dr Weber looks through a window in Buchenwald and sees a farmer ploughing a nearby field, taking no notice of the camp which he can clearly see. (p.298) Like Dietrich Hahn, the farmer chooses not to know. This sort of wilful ignorance, obliviousness or choosing not to know, is quite different from the genuinely innocent ignorance of the two children who are at the centre of The Wish Child. Choosing not to know is complicity.

Countering this, the novel has another thematic thread about the need to document and know. Much imagery points to this need, especially in scenes where Dr Weber examines and develops photographs in Buchenwald’s photography room, where SS officer Hahn has installed him to do lighter duties than other prisoners.

And what does the title Remote Sympathy mean? It can be unpicked in many ways.  It refers literally to Dr Weber’s “cancer-curing” machine which, he explains, is supposed to operate on “the theory of remote sympathy – that treating one part of the body could affect a seemingly unconnected part [because] the body is a circuit.” (p.99) But then there is the cautious, self-distancing sympathy Dr Weber feels for Frau Hahn, even if he has to remain subservient and is saving his own life. And there is the very, very remote sympathy of German “Aryans” for the suffering of other peoples – a sympathy so remote that it barely exists. And the decaying of sympathy among the prisoners themselves, as they face starvation, are brutalised and each begins to look after himself first. And the remote sympathy we as readers feel now that these events are fading into the historical past. And - it has to be included, because for one character there is a strong religious experience later in the novel - perhaps the remote sympathy of God who merely looks on. There is the horrible irony, late in the novel, of a copy of the Bible being hidden inside a copy of Mein Kampf. This image could be interpreted in more ways than I would dare to attempt.

Is this novel ultimately about delusions and self-deception, including the desperate hopes that its main characters have for things they cannot ever have? Or is it about the power of hope? Judge for yourself.

At over 500 pages, Remote Sympathy is a long novel, but the length is fully justified by all the sharply-observed detail and by the “slow burn” of historical events as the war advances to its end, bombs begin to fall and SS men and others move from worry to panic. More than anything, though, it is the careful development of characters that justifies the length. Fired by real historical knowledge, Catherine Chidgey is an acute observer of human strengths and weaknesses and a very accomplished story-teller. This is a great novel.  

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE WISH CHILD” by Catherine Chidgey (Victoria University Press, $45)

A couple of years back I watched on Youtube Claude Chabrol’s 1993 documentary film L’Oeil de Vichy (The Eye of Vichy).  With minimal explanatory commentary, it consists (almost) entirely of selections from newsreels and propaganda films made by France’s collaborationist Vichy regime between 1940 and 1944. If one were to believe this footage, one would believe that France was prospering under Marshal Petain, that there was no unemployment, that Nazi Germany was a benign ally, that the Allied cause was defeated and that resistance to the Vichy regime consisted only of a handful of criminals in foreign pay.

Chabrol was criticised severely in some quarters for not constantly showing and telling viewers that this was all propagandist fantasy, having no credible connection with what was really happening in France in those years. But Chabrol was a more cunning film-maker than his critics realised. What he was doing was showing the mentality of those who ran the collaborationist regime, and the influence they had. And he was banking on the sophistication of his viewers to realise that these old actuality films were untruthful. In the last ten minutes of his film he lifted the veil which the ancient propaganda had woven, and showed raw and undoctored footage of the retribution that came in 1944 as armed partisans turned on those who had collaborated, and the Vichy regime crumbled in shame and recrimination.

It took just those last minutes to expose how mendacious was everything that had gone before – but in the preceding hour-and-a-half, we had been able to share the delusions of an authoritarian regime.

This is a lengthy but, I hope, not irrelevant introduction to what I think Catherine Chidgey is doing in her novel The Wish Child. I will reverse my usual procedure and cut to a verdict at once. This is an extraordinary novel, written not only with a real and close understanding of the history which it fictionalises, but written in a way that enables us to get under the skin of people who thought and felt very differently from the way we think or feel. Like the very best of recent New Zealand historical novels (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Paula Morris’s Rangatira, Charlotte Randall’s Hokitika Town and The Bright Side of My Condition and a few others), Catherine Chidgey avoids stereotypes. How did young Germans under the Nazi regime think? What did they dream of? What did they hope for or fear? Because dreams and fears come into it, there are moments of what amounts to surrealism and (as the author explains in her end-note) there are deliberate departures from the literal historical record. This novel is not a chronicle. As in Chabrol’s film, there is no overt preaching. Like Chabrol, Chidgey banks on her audience being informed enough to realise that how her main characters see the world often bears little resemblance to any objective historical reality.

With bookends of later history, the main narrative runs from 1939 to 1945. A young girl, Sieglinde Heilmann, lives with her middle-class family in Berlin, where her father is a respectable functionary. A young boy, Erich Kroning, lives with his farming family somewhere near Leipzig, part of the peasant class that Hitler’s Blut und Boden ideology so favoured. It is the experience of these two children that the novel follows, through chapters often titled with Nazi slogans or phrases  - “Strength Through Joy”, “Fuhrer Weather”, “You Too Belong to the Fuhrer” (the last being the slogan on a propaganda poster encouraging parents to enrol very young children in Nazi organisations). Inevitably, the main story runs from the first dizzy year of German victory, when Hitler was still extremely popular, to the final catastrophic disillusion as the Red Army pours through the bombed-out rubble of Berlin.

It is important that Sieglinde and Erich are children – vulnerable and “innocent” and therefore, more than their elders are, blank slates upon which regime propaganda may be written. Sieglinde is often puzzled or confused about what is happening around her. Erich is the innocent true believer in the Fuhrer. But there is a controlling irony to this novel in the disjunction between the perception of these children and what we (should) know. We (should) know that a monstrous regime is being depicted, but for the novel’s German middle-class and farming families, it is everyday normality. And for the children who are the novel’s most consistent witnesses to events, there are gaps which we, as readers, have to fill.

What is not known by the novel’s characters cannot intrude upon their thoughts. In one of the novel’s more Kafkaesque touches Sieglinde’s father Gottlieb Heilmann is employed excising inconvenient words from printed texts – words like “love”, “mercy”, “defeat”, “sorrow”, “promise” or “surrender”. He is the bureaucrat in a totalitarian regime whose function is to wash away possible subversive modes of thought. He is like the purveyors of “Newspeak” in 1984. Each chapter in The Wish Child is preceded with a text out of which key words have been chopped, rendering the texts either nonsensical or highly cryptic.

Chidgey represents common, uninformed (and rumour-filled) opinion with recurring dialogues between a Frau Miller and a Frau Muller, a perverse Greek Chorus of gossip.  They talk about Hitler’s speeches or working in a factory where busts of Hitler are made or children denouncing their parents or how hard it is to have rationed soap, always expressing both self-interest and the common prejudices of their time and place. They are the social milieu in which young Sieglinde lives. The propaganda that bears upon her directly is heard in another recurring device – the commentary of a schoolteacher who gives a Nazi spin to the guided tours of young schoolchildren through factories processing food, making radios or making toys.

Chidgey, well-versed in German literature and history, trusts her readers to pick up allusions which are not explained. Take the following example. Young Sieglinde is reflecting on a poem she has learnt at school:

“At night her mask waits at the foot of her bed, and she listens to the siren and thinks of a golden comb slipping through lengths of golden hair. The poem comes to her as she lies listening – but it is not a poem, Fraulein Althaus has told them, it is a folk song, a traditional old German song written by nobody. Still, the children do not sing it, this old siren song, but recite the lines in unison, and at night they come to Sieglinde as she waits for the bombs to flash above her, jewels glimpsed from a little boat at the river’s deadly bend. O dark water.” (p.46)

If you are in the know, you will understand that the poem Sieglinde is thinking about is Heinrich Heine’s Die Lorelei. It was possibly the best-known poem in the German language and certainly the one that German schoolchildren learnt the way English schoolchildren learnt Wordworth’s Daffodils or French schoolchildren learnt Verlaine’s Chanson d’Automne. For the Nazis, the embarrassment was that Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet of the nineteenth century, was Jewish. Therefore in the Nazi years, this unignorable poem was palmed off as a “traditional” folk poem. (For a comment on what happened to Heine’s statue in Hamburg, see my post Unlaid Ghosts from July 2014).

Another allusion is the very title of the novel. The Wish Child was the title of a novel by Ina Seidel, very popular in Germany in 1930s, set in the Napoleonic wars and embracing a very Blut und Boden outlook. Catherine Chidgey turns this outlook upside down.

There are much more sinister unexplained allusions than this. In one sequence, the woman guiding children through a factory (pp. 140-141) warns them of the danger of poisonous mushrooms. This takes point if you already know that a widely-distributed Nazi book for children compared Jews to poison mushrooms. It is never explained (and never enquired into by adult characters) why there should be, in Berlin, so many auctions of household effects in houses of people who have been moved out. (“Which people?” we should ask alertly.) Whose clothes are being unpicked to find jewels sown in them? (p.148) From whom did the hair come which is being stuffed into mattresses and providing hair for toy dolls? (p.159) If, by this stage, you cannot hear echoes of cattle-trucks carting people off to death camps, then you have not got the measure of this book. Be it noted that Jews are scarcely mentioned, although in one nightmare image a Berliner Jewish couple complain that their apartment is getting smaller and smaller while their German neighbours’ apartment is getting larger.

I have said that Catherine Chidgey’s style is sometimes surreal. But paradoxically, some of the most surreal material is straight reportage. Think, for example, of a scene where a Nazi “wedding” is performed for a young woman whose betrothed is already dead. But then he died a German hero on the field of battle and she is of the right Aryan blood and so she has the right to a “wedding”. What could be more surreal than people getting used to the bodies being piled up in the streets after air-raids? Added to the foreboding in the later passages are rumours (half-understood by the children) of a “shadow man” and revived nightmares of a Nachzehrer (vampire from dark German folktales). In the following passage, Chidgey is describing quite literally the making of cast heads of Hitler, that members of the Volk were encouraged to display in their homes. But the literal description has a clearly symbolic undertone:

“The heads are lighter than they appear, cast in base metal and finished to look like solid bronze. They warm beneath the women’s hands, coming to life, but if you turn them upside down you will find they are hollow; you will see the backwards mouth, the backwards eyes, the dark dome of the skull. The women touch the flow lines and the voids, the linden-leaf blemishes, deciding what they can correct with their brushes and cloths and what cannot be fixed. There might be a hole in the temple, the suggestion of a wound, a congenital fault: such examples are returned to the furnace and melted back down. I have witnessed this process, the malformed faces distending and collapsing, unmaking themselves.” (p.86)

Much of The Wish Child consists of interior monologue of the city girl Sieglinde or of the farm-boy Erich (who is puzzled by unanswered questions about his background.) But I have not mentioned something that gives this novel its particular flavour. On the opening page we are introduced to a disembodied and unidentified narrator, who speaks thus:

“Let me say that I was not in the world long enough to understand it well, so can give you only impressions, like the shapes left in rock by long-decayed leaves, or the pencil rubbings of doves and skulls that are but flimsy memories of stone. Just these little smudges, these traces of light and shadow, these breaths in and out. They feel like mine” (p.13)

Who or what is this narrator, who looks on events and comments on characters in a curiously detached way? As always, it is not my purpose to spike the surprises of a newly published novel. But I can say that this voice is connected to the Nazi embrace of eugenics in a way that makes the “wish” of the novel’s title profoundly disturbing. In a scene set in a medal factory, the schoolchildren’s guide expresses propaganda for motherhood, but in a way that is eugenicist and racially-based. She tells the children: “It’s not sufficient, though, simply to produce these children – anyone can do that; look at the gypsies. No, girls, you must be judged worthy of the [motherhood] medal – your conduct as well as your blood – and not only the number but also the quality of the children is considered….” (p.132)

This sort of biological racism comes to dominate the novel’s nightmare and is the novel’s key indictment of the regime. It is underscored when the image of the fossilised Kayhausen Boy is used to teach a eugenics lesson about how the weak do not deserve to survive; or another in which Erich is measured with callipers to show he is a true Aryan. The front-flap blurb of The Wish Child describes the novel as “a profound meditation on the wreckage caused by a corrupt ideology, on the resilience of the human spirit, and on crimes that cannot be undone”. Well, maybe, though this formula makes it sound a little more pat than it really is. I see its relevance to our own age as much in its exposure of a eugenics mentality, which judges people in purely materialistic terms of their utility – meaning that the chronically sick, the deformed or the mentally ill are not wanted, and should be eliminated. Though the term eugenics has long since been abandoned, this mentality is still very much with us.

I am resistant to those who judge the value of literature by how much it emotionally moved them (“Oh it was so MOVING!” somebody may witter of a sentimental film). But I do have to record my reaction to the final meeting of Sieglinde and Erich in shattered Berlin and the way their story works out. It is wrenching, shattering, indeed one of the few times that reading a novel has almost driven me to tears.

Was it an artistic mistake of the author not to end the story in the rubble of Berlin, 1945? I’ll let others judge that one. But by carrying it on to East and West Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s, and the way the Communist Stasi spied and censored the way the Gestapo had, Chidgey does make a major point about the durability of humanity’s dark side.

This is a brilliant novel, with a cohesive and persuasive vision of human beings under stress, a subtle prose-style and a major grasp of things that really matter.