Intriguing crime expose and more
A tale of contemporary helplessness where nothing is as it seems, writes David Herkt.
Fear is a novel that amply justifies its title. Dirk Kurbjuweit calmly reveals the boundaries of ordinary life and the frightening possibilities that wait just outside. It is a superbly controlled, stomach-tightening exploration of a murder in the family-friendly suburbs of Berlin, where parquet-floored older houses are divided into apartments and neighbours bring each other gifts of cake.
‘‘I always believed my father was capable of a massacre …’’ begins the back-cover blurb, ‘‘it’s inevitable if you grew up the way I did.’’ Randolph’s 78-year-old father is in prison, serving a sentence for the manslaughter of his son’s downstairs’ neighbour. The family visit regularly for obligatory awkward reunions.
Kurbjuweit’s pacing is perfect. It is a novel which almost surreptitiously closes noose-tight. Fear delineates a situation we all know and dread; a breakdown of relations with a near neighbour. The tenant in the basement flat is a man with problems. He has been raised in government care and he begins stalking Randolph, his wife, Rebecca, and their young children, Paul and Fay, shortly after they move in.
It is also a novel of contemporary helplessness. How can you do anything when nothing really has happened – at least, not yet? Fear also explores family history – how it facilitates or breaks relationships and how it can blind us to what is really happening.
When the police are called, the neighbour’s body is on the floor, and Randolph’s gun-obsessed father stands there with his newly-cleaned pistol, waiting for arrest. The trial is perfunctory. Kurbjuweit then backgrounds the events of the murder and reveals how the growth of suspicion can destroy even the most intimate moments of a marriage.
Fear is set in the clean contemporary Germany of social care and responsibility. The downstairs’ tenant, however, had begun leaving loveletters to Rebecca outside the front door. Then, once confronted and rejected, started reporting Randolph and Rebecca to the police on suspicion of sexual child-abuse, every contemporary parent’s nightmare.
Germany possesses no harassment law which would cover the situation, and Randolph and Rebecca’s marriage begins unravelling. Ultimately suspicions must fester. Can they trust each other with the children? What does happen behind the bathroom door? And how does the novel’s reader process the events as they are told?
What might initially appear as an intriguing expose of a crime eventually becomes much, much more. Fear, already a bestseller in Germany, is a document of our times. We can see ourselves reflected, often in ways we’d prefer to ignore. Nothing, however, is ever quite as it seems and Kurbjuweit leaves every option is open until the very end.