The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Old wounds,
controlled Germany onboard a minesweeper. What happened to her in the immediate aftermath of the war, and its impact upon her and her daughter, sends repercussions into our own era. Despite everything she had already been through, it was, she said, the worst time of all.
On discovering the full story, the author questions her own actions in digging up the truth: “From the comfort of the next generation, I had thought the past too distant to still hold the power to wound.”
It is one of many similar conceits held by those of us who have never lived through such situations. Library shelves are packed with war stories of outstanding heroism or cruelty, but few tread the path of Inge’s War. In piecing together the way her greatgrandparents and her grandmother navigated the war, O’Donnell paints a portrait of millions of unseen, unrecorded citizens: those who tried to keep their heads down, who did no active harm, but whose blinkered view, or eagerness to save their own kin, helped create hell on earth.
It is sobering to reflect that Inge’s reactions are of especial historical interest because, as her clear-eyed but admiring granddaughter writes, “My grandmother’s life was not one of innocence or guilt. It was one of extraordinary events, of the things we do to survive, and how they shape our lives.”
Picador, £8.99
Author of the bestseller Room, which she adapted into an Oscar-nominated screenplay, Donoghue tells the story of Noah Selvaggio, a widowed New York academic who is planning to mark his 80th birthday by revisiting Nice, the city of his birth, for the first time since he was four. At the last moment, he learns he has to take along his 11-year-old greatnephew, Michael. They’ve never met before, but Michael’s father has died of an overdose, his mother is in prison and he’ll be taken into care if a relative won’t take him in. Noah, who intended to explore his roots and solve a family mystery about his mother’s activities during World War II, finds his plans disrupted by a sullen, uncouth street kid. Generational clashes like this are old hat, but Akin has charm alongside its predictability, and the tough learning that has to be done along the way makes it worth the effort.
THE WARLOW EXPERIMENT Alix Nathan
Serpent’s Tail, £8.99
Having discovered a 1797 periodical describing how a Mr Powyss of Moreham, Lancashire, had offered £50 a year for life to any man who would agree to be shut underground and see no one for seven years, Alix Nathan was unable to find out any more, and has relied on her imagination to fill in the gaps. In her novel, the willing subject, Warlow, is 43, a labourer with little schooling; his jailer, Powyss, an obscure horticulturalist who believes the experiment will be his passport to the
Royal Society. Nathan tracks how both men change over the course of Warlow’s confinement – which, of course, doesn’t go quite as planned. With the agitation caused by the French Revolution rumbling in the background, it’s a portrait of social inequality suffused with the very Gothic essence Powyss despises, and if Nathan’s tight control starts to slip towards the end it’s still a darkly compelling read.
THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN Georges Simenon
Penguin Classics, £8.99 Penguin’s extensive Simenon reissue programme reaches this atypical novel, a fictionalised account of how the author met his second wife, set an ocean away from his usual French milieu. In 1940s New York, divorced actor Francois, whose wife left him for a younger man, meets the lonely, troubled Kay by chance at an all-night diner. As they get to know each other, the pair drift through a city of rainswept streets, bars and seedy hotels, drinking and trying to work out what has drawn the two of them together. Drawing elements from noir and existentialism, its terse, staccato prose summons up a bleak, jaded mood, a strained kind of romanticism in which two sad and damaged people desperately seek out a connection. It’s no masterpiece, but a distinctive and essential book for Simenon fans, showing what the prolific author could do away from the detective novels he’s more usually associated with.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT