Note: Wray’s debut novel, THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP, was one of my favorite novels of 2001. My review of it, posted below, appeared on Amazon on May 28, 2001.
Successful on every level!
With this stunning debut novel, John Wray leaps onto the literary stage fully mature, with a book so polished and assured that lovers of great writing will be celebrating this book for a long time. Wray shows no uncertainty. He has total control of his dramatic raw material–the rise of the Nazis in Austria, the Dollfuss Affair, 
and the Anschluss–and he never once stoops to sensationalism, never pushes any of those easy anti-Hitler buttons, never loses his characters in the intensity of the action, and never lets us forget that Hitler’s rise was possible because ordinary people allowed it to happen.
As the book opens, Oskar Voxlauer, is returning to Austria after twenty years in the Ukraine, where he has lived following his desertion from the horrors of Isonzo in World War I. His Socialist ideals have crumbled in the face of the communist reality, his lover has died, and he hasn’t seen his family or his former home since he was seventeen. Unable to adjust to the changes which have taken place in Niessen, he finds work in the mountains as a gamekeeper for a Jewish friend, occasionally visiting the town and his somewhat dotty mother. Although Oskar finds love in the mountains with Else Bauer, he sometimes worries about his stability, suffering from occasional hallucinations and panic attacks and sometimes reacting violently to the injustices he sees and feels. He finds comfort in nature, even when the Nazi menace begins to threaten him, his relationship with Else, and his Jewish friend, Pauli Ryslavy.
The lively third person narrative alternates wth Oskar’s poignant and lengthy memories from his past–in the Ukraine and in the Austria of twenty years ago. When Else’s cousin, Kurt Bauer, a high-ranking SS of
ficial, arrives, a new point of view opens, as Bauer, too, contributes reminiscences–about the growth of his Nazi commitment, the killing of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, and his plans for a Nazi Austria. These interior monologues are incredibly powerful, highlighting the similarities and contrasts in the lives of Oskar and Bauer, both ordinary people who have been caught up in different political movements, committed to them for different reasons.
Putting all the politics into perspective are some of the most lyrical and gorgeous extended descriptions of nature you’ll ever read-including butterflies with their “parchment-like wingbeats,” two fox cubs, one of which “held the spine of a trout in its teeth like a diadem,” and even inkpot toads, with their “bright yellow undersides [that] bled a dark, poisonous-looking ink from tiny vents along their ribs.” This is a successful novel on every level, and it is not far-fetched to read of comparisons between it and Joseph Roth’s earlier Austrian masterpiece, THE RADETZKY MARCH. which focuses on Austria during World War I.
Notes: John Wray’s second novel, CANAAN’S TONGUE, set along the Mississippi in 1863, is a quantum leap, in terms of its broad canvas and epic themes, though I thought it lacked the “humanity” of his earlier novel. My review of CANAAN’S TONGUE appeared on Amazon in June, 2005: http://www.amazon.com.
For the review of LOWBOY, just click this title.
John Wray’s website is here: http://www.johnwray.net/
