Crime and punishment
Ferdinand von Schirach’s horrific true crime stories expose our vulnerability to simple twists of fate,
This slender book of stories, Guilt, from a German defence lawyer, based on his years of practice, is full of horrible crimes, innocent victims and sad lives. They’re written in a crisp, spare style with so few details that most are little more than summaries of events, as if they were unfinished notes intended for future elaboration. Some are shorter than this review.
The collection opens with “Funfair,” in which a girl is spontaneously gang raped by a group of respectable family men. They are amateur musicians playing for the crowd at a small town festival; when she steps backstage to bring them drinks during their break, her life is destroyed. There’s no reason why, the perpetrators themselves don’t understand how they came to such acts. Because the girl couldn’t see them in the darkness, or identify them in court, and because the DNA evidence was lost when she was cared for in hospital, the men are released. This case is very early in the attorney’s career, and although he competently defends his client — one of the men — it represents his loss of innocence, the point when all his assumptions about his career and the judicial process are stripped away.
Time and again in these stories an innocent person is inexplicably drawn into a nightmare, their lives are ruined, justice is eluded, and we’re left thinking how cruel life is. The overriding motif is that the victims must bear the guilt, even when the criminals are sentenced.
A few are different; particularly one of the longest is the book, “The Key.” There aren’t a lot more details, but it’s more complicated, with more actors, all of whom are criminals. It’s my favourite in the book, and could easily be an Elmore Leonard story or a Quentin Tarantino movie. It concerns three different groups of mobsters whose wires get crossed over a large drug deal and a stolen car, and it rockets along like a thriller as they all try to out-tough each other.
Von Schirach quotes Aristotle in an opening epigram: “Things are as they are,” and there’s not much more to say about, or for this book. It’s not a collection whose component parts could stand well on their own: some are little more than further examples of the unpredictable, savagely disinterested nature of being. Collectively they create a somber, fatalistic view which leaves us melancholy, but not enriched. Life is bad. Are we surprised?
In almost all the stories, the women are victims of the men, have been victims all their lives. The exception is an unnamed woman in “The Key,” who is one of the crooks — she’s the only woman whose story we’re not given. She acts her part, icy cold and with more guts than most men could manage, and that’s it. We know nothing about her, what she looks like, who she is; even her name is denied us. Not so for all the other female characters. Every battered, raped, deceived and murdered victim has their history, which is invariably normal and middle-class; the single woman in the book who acts without fear, with cunning and determination, is anonymous. I’m not sure what to make of that.
Yes, that is at least partially an admission that I don’t get it. If this book is simply a record of experience, well then, OK. But the stripped-down, just-thefacts presentation, as if we were indeed reading court records, leaves out so much we normally expect in our fiction; I can’t see how this stringent simplicity should be considered profound, instead of merely empty. I seem to be alone among reviewers in this, at least according to the book jacket. Like so many others, it’s replete with outlandish praise from Important Names.
The fact of evil, of chaos, is not so profound as all that. No more than the fact of the sky or the Earth, and if we point as briefly and simply to these things, as von Schirach does to unhappy circumstance, does that itself conjure meaning?
Still, the prose is elegant and precise, many of the situations are emotionally affecting, and the cumulative effect of so many incursions of violence into ordinary lives is a chilling reminder that no matter how secure or quiet our existence, opportunities for guilt arise everywhere. Remember that unused confinement room in Pickering? Michel Basilières is the author of Black Bird (Knopf Canada). He teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.