In this unusual novel about an unusual and touching friendship, author Georgina Harding tells the story of life in a rural community in Romania beginning in the 1930s and extending through World War II and the Communist Occupation. As the novel opens, a sick and starving man has just arrived by train in Iasi, a place with which he is completely unfamiliar. He is looking for a woman, but he does not know where or how to find her. Eventually, he sees a nurse dressed in white walking past him and, thinking she is an angel, he follows her to a hospital, where he collapses. The man is Augustin, known as Tinu, and he is looking for Safta, a childhood friend whom he has not seen since they were separated by the war and Communist Occupation. Tinu is both deaf and mute, uninterested or unable to learn sign language. His only form of communication is through haunting drawings which he makes with soot and spit on found materials – paper, boxes, wrappings, pieces of cloth – and these drawings reflect an unusually selective view of the world. On my Favorites list for the year.
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Booker Prize winner Graham Swift has never shied away from literary challenges, and with this novel he tackles two issues which few other writers would even attempt, much less succeed in overcoming. This novel is almost totally about death in all its aspects, with no humor to leaven the heavy mood and the profound sadness which the novel ultimately evokes. And, making his subject and themes even more difficult to bring to life, he creates a main character and many peripheral characters who are inarticulate people who think in clichés and deal with the everyday challenges of their lives in “tried and true” fashion. The reader quickly becomes aware that these characters have few, if any, thoughts about the larger world, any perceived role they might have in it, and even how they might differ, in the grand scheme of life, from the animals on the farm to which they have devoted their lives. Still, Swift manages to create a novel which inspires the reader’s complete empathy with his limited main characters who stay true to their limited views of life and their limited expectations. His novel becomes, ultimately, a study of how an unreflective, uneducated everyman handles the disasters that fate and time deal out to him, over which he believes he has no control.
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Readers who enjoyed Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first mystery to be translated into English, The Keeper of Lost Causes, which I found “as close to perfect as a mystery can be,” will probably become as captivated by this second novel as they were by the first. The Absent One, however, is somewhat different in its focus from the first novel, spending less time on establishing the character of Detective Carl Morck, who has been assigned to run Department Q of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters. Morck described in the previous novel as “lazy, surly, morose, always bitching, and [constantly] treating his colleagues like crap,” has experienced the trauma of having one partner killed while another, the gentle, six-foot, nine-inch giant Hardy has ended up paralyzed from the neck down in a fight from which Morck himself escaped serious injury. He has always blamed himself for the terrible outcome and has had little interest in doing much of anything at work, as a result. This case concerns a group of friends whose relationship goes back to prep school. With one major exception, all have become immensely successful – and wealthy. The only female of the group disappeared long ago. As Morck, Assad, and Rose investigate, the female, Kimmie, is tracked by the rest of the gang, fearful of what she might reveal.
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Seventy-year-old Harry Chapman has been ill at home, and has just been admitted to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment. Confined to bed for the next two weeks, Harry, a writer, cannot help sharing his thoughts and “suppositions” with the reader and sometimes the hospital staff, recreating conversations and bringing family members, friends, and literary characters to life. But Harry does not stop there. Books, poems, plays, and paintings are also a vivid part of his on-going reality, and some of Harry’s favorite literary characters and his most admired fellow writers cross the borders of reality and fiction to work their way into his memories of real people and real events. His attention constantly jumps around, but it is through these seemingly random memories, stories, favorite poems, and observations about life that author Paul Bailey succeeds in bringing Harry to life and creating a “real” person for the reader. Ultimately, author Paul Bailey creates a novel in which Harry becomes an everyman on an odyssey, one in which he seeks answers to life’s most basic questions of what life means and whether the journey has been worthwhile.
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Although a major part of The Absolutist centers on the horrors of World War I, Irish author John Boyne has created a novel which goes beyond the typical “war story” and becomes also a study of character and values. This broader scope allows the novel to appeal to a wide audience interested in seeing the effects of war on the main character, Tristan Sadler, throughout the rest of his life. More a popular novel than a “literary” novel in its appeal to the reader, Boyne has carefully constructed the plot with alternating time settings – before, during, and after the war – to take full advantage of the elements of surprise. The author often hints at personal catastrophes or dramatic events in one part of the novel, creating a sense of suspense and foreboding, then reveals these secret events in grand fashion in another part, keeping the pace so lively that it is difficult for the reader to find a place to stop. Though the novel is very serious, with no humor to leaven it, The Absolutist is riveting, and a fast read, showing the personal side effects of war’s horrors.
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