fiction – Page 46

Two Women in Berlin

September 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Dieter Riemenschneider

I Am Always With You, by Philip Temple (Random House, 2006), 447 pp., $36.99; Hand Me Down World, by Lloyd Jones (Penguin NZ, 2010), 313 pp., $40.00.

The title of this review might very well have been ‘Two Men in Berlin’, since the writing of both novels was obviously closely connected to their authors’ stay in the city as guests of Creative New Zealand’s Berlin Writers Residency, respectively in 2003–04 and 2007–08. Yet if their choice of Berlin as the stage of action was almost inevitable, they must have decided on good reasons for placing women at the centre of their stories.

Philip Temple’s sculptor Hermann Blumenthal in his last letter from the war in August 1942 to his wife Maria in Berlin reassuringly closes with ‘I am always with you’. These words gradually begin haunting his widow in her dreams and finally, in the postwar years, she begins to hallucinate her husband’s actual physical presence. Maria, only just forty years old, gentle, sensitive, once a budding writer and the mother of two very young boys, loses her grasp on reality and finally gives way. This is Temple’s first theme.

Though Sarah Quigley in her Listener review of 2006 complained with good reason about Temple’s failure to merge the documentary and the fictional, it seems feasible to me to judge his achievement from a less literary-critical angle, especially because I belong to the author’s own age group. The psychological, economic and financial problems experienced by a young widow with children during and after the war years are not at all unfamiliar to me. The novel succeeds in narrating the fate of this small family, and in the unfolding process of Maria’s inability to bear her burden – in spite of the support extended to her by her husband’s artist colleagues and her women friends, and in spite of her sense of responsibility to her sons.

In the end, the many losses she is made to suffer – of her husband, of her three siblings and of her mother, as well as of her childhood home, the deprivations of the war and postwar years in Berlin – combined with her resignation of never having the time and strength to fulfil her deepest wish to become a writer – prove too much. It is a fate Maria shared with so many of her female contemporaries.

In the course of narrating her story, Temple moves away from the perspective of an observer, and instead lets an inner voice speak to the reader – and here I disagree with Quigley’s comment. On the contrary, interior monologue and stream of consciousness do not replace the narrator, but rather in Maria’s last years they relate more and more closely to the tone and content of her letters to a female friend and in this way almost take over her story.

Temple’s second major concern is his wish to reconsider his own (and also that of many of his non-German readers) deeply ingrained conviction about the evil nature of all Germans lumped together, a view the author’s generation had adopted – and was made to adopt as the accepted wisdom – during and after World War II. Counterpointing Maria’s more or less fictionalised life story, Temple the historian retells the story of the group of artists to which Blumenthal belonged, the Ateliergemeinschaft Klosterstrasse, who worked and lived in Berlin between 1933 and 1945 — and whose story, unfortunately, is not at all well known in Germany. Wishing to reassess their views and convictions vis-à-vis the Nazi regime, and possibly their roles as the proverbial monkeys who did not see, hear or speak evil — and perhaps even their active collaboration in criminal deeds — Temple brings to the fore the problematic of a group of people as averse to racism as to Nazi rule. Their failure, if any, lies in realising too late where the country had been taken by a dictatorial regime that gradually unfolded its true totalitarian and anti-Semitic nature, and in their guilt at having been unable to live other than by withdrawing into inner emigration. They weighed the alternative of open resistance against their need to survive, and decided on the latter, not least, as one of the artists put it, to enable them to spread the ideas of freedom, equality and peace to future generations.

As one who belongs to Temple’s generation, I have reproached my elders for their lack of foresight and reason as much as for their cowardice, but I gradually learned of people who had behaved in a similar way to most of the Ateliergemeinschaft artists; and yet, with others of my generation we hardly dared refer to them (and to those who had helped Jews to survive) lest this sounded like an easy excuse, to be interpreted as relativising or even minimising our guilt and the atrocities committed by so many of our countrymen. Only in recent years, and with a generation historically removed from the past, has a more differentiating approach been developed. It is to Temple’s credit as a non-German fiction writer and historian that he has confronted a dilemma deeply disturbing to so many of our generation and reached ‘the end of [his] journey of understanding, acceptance and reconciliation’ (443).

By contrast, Jones’s woman in Berlin is an illegal migrant from North Africa who has found her way to the city to search for her son that her lover – an African-American-German – had abducted more than three years before from a hotel where she had worked and met him. Having been helped to find out his address, she makes arrangements with him to see her boy, though only irregularly and for just one hour each time. Moreover, she is made to pay for this ‘favour’, which forces her to borrow money from, and pawn the belongings of, the blind man she works for as a domestic aide and carer.

The reader first comes to know Ines — a pseudonym that she has adopted — through the eyes of people who had met her when she lived in Africa, during her journey through Italy, and in Berlin. Thereafter she talks about her experiences from a prison cell in Italy, and here we face a very different person from the one described by others. To them she had appeared a woman difficult to place, a taciturn person who often did not, or did not want to, understand their language, or who was plainly unwilling to share her thoughts and feelings with them – as long as they had not found out more about her. Yet through her own story we come to know an extremely articulate speaker who is intelligent, who has much foresight and, depending on the occasion, is adaptable and capable, and a schemer in her near-obsessive desire to be reunited with her child. Who should the reader believe? And who should the Police Inspector believe, while re-tracing her trail?

My own response to Jones’s novel is one of perplexity about many aspects. The multi-voiced narrative rarely draws me in mentally or emotionally, which is due mainly to the disconcerting medley of stories told by various characters whose importance to the main plot seems at times too slight — e.g. Ralph’s, the Inspector’s or Abebi’s — and at others too weighty — especially Defoe’s — whose narrative takes up a fifth of the novel.

I also can’t cope with a plot filled with so many improbabilities: Ines, hardly a swimmer, dog-paddles from a buoy to a beach in Sicily for more than a day and a night. She encounters only trusting, selfless and helpful people, while never for a moment facing the danger of being discovered, let alone arrested, as a highly visible illegal migrant in Italy with its overflow of newcomers from Africa. Also hardly believable is the sequence of lucky circumstances that enable her to easily shoulder the physically strenuous journey of several hundred kilometres from Sicily to the Italian mainland, and on foot across the Alps into Austria. Finally, there’s Berlin, which is presented as a city of trains, stations, bridges and a zoo. Ines’s world is crowded with beggars and alcoholics hanging out at the suburban stations, and with homeless people, the down-and-outs, some of whom have found a temporary abode in an empty warehouse. Almost all of them prove harmless, many are kind and helpful. There is just the odd bad person, especially Jermayne, the boy’s father who stole her away from him, whose relentless badness sticks out like a sore thumb.

Certainly, all these people including Ines, are meant to be presented to us as living in a ‘hand-me-down world’, but Jones’s tale, in spite of its stylistic breadth and deliberate structural composition, fails to invoke my empathy for its people’s fate as presented in its pages. Instead I read it as a melodramatic mélange of characters, events and locations that does not really grasp the dramatic, even tragic, destiny of North African migrants risking their lives to escape to Southern Europe.

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER was formerly Professor of English Language Literatures at the University of Frankfurt (1972–99); he has written widely on Indian, African, Maori and Australian-Aboriginal-literatures-in-English. More recent books include The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004 (2005), and Wildes Licht (a bilingual anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry) (2010).

School of Saint Augustine

August 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Chris Else
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)

A book that is billed as ‘a philosophical thriller’ poses unusual questions. We don’t judge science fiction by the accuracy of its science. Nor do we require historical novels to adhere strictly to the facts. In both cases, perhaps, we would want the writer to be aware of the accepted consensus and to take account of it but the whole point of fiction is that it involves an invented reality. Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew, for example, is a novel first and history second. How then should we approach a fiction that is centred round a philosophical problem? Does it really matter if the analysis of that problem is unsound or incomplete? Should one forget the philosophy and talk about the fiction or should one criticise the philosophy and the fiction? The answer, I suppose, is that it depends on the book.

In Tim Corballis’s Measurement the protagonist goes through a rite of passage that involves a confrontation with a philosophical text. To the initiated, the text described is a thinly disguised version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. To the uninitiated this barely matters. The novel is not about whether Wittgenstein is right or wrong but about a particular character for whom the fictional text, with its pseudo-Wittgensteinian theses, is a reflection of a personal life view.

Beckett does not operate in quite this way. At the centre of his earlier novel, Genesis, is the question of whether or not computers could ever be considered conscious beings. Characters and plot are subservient to or aspects of the argument around this question, which involves the nature of mind and the relationship of mind and body. Beckett makes a fair fist of weighing up the standard theories as to whether or not the mind is anything other than the brain and he provides a clever twist towards the end that not only turns one of the reader’s key assumptions on its head but also nudges the argument towards a conclusion. Genesis was labelled as a young adult novel and it gave me the sense that Beckett, a secondary school teacher, was driven to write it by motives that were partly pedagogical. Such a book invites or even demands that its argument be a major focus of a critical response.

August takes a similar approach. This time the question is whether or not human beings have free will. Generally, philosophical questions resolve themselves into opposing positions. Cast them in fictional form, and this tendency results in some sort of contest or trial. In Genesis, the main protagonist is subject to examination by a tribunal. In August, there are two confrontations. In the narrative present, the hero, Tristan, is trapped in a wrecked car with Grace, a girl he is in love with despite having met her only once before. They recount their stories to one another: parallel and contrasting tales that offer reflections on the central argument. Grace has been brought up in a convent where strict conformity to a set of rules has governed her life, and from which she has been expelled because her feelings for her fellow human beings have led her into disobedience.

Tristan, whose story is more central to the book, has been cloistered in a school devoted to scholastic reasoning around the work of St Augustine. Here the second confrontation takes place, between Tristan and the Rector – the mentor and father figure who teaches, tempts and tests. Central to the discussion is a religious paradox. If God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future, a person’s actions are determined. But if behaviour is determined, people do not have free will and therefore God cannot hold them responsible for their actions.

In one sense, as Grace points out, this question has no bearing on a moral life. Whether or not actions are predetermined is irrelevant to the business of deciding what to do. Tristan and the Rector move beyond this point, however, and agree on a test: can the Rector predict what Tristan will do in a complex game that involves interaction with two other people and seems to offer a vast range of possible outcomes? Tristan, who believes that he has free will, bets that he cannot. The Rector believes otherwise. Tristan fails and discovers that, against all his expectations, prior to the contest, the Rector has written down a precise description of his actions.

The first observation that this scene suggests is that, if Tristan’s actions are predetermined so is the Rector’s prediction. To the extent that Tristan was not free, the Rector was not right. A second observation is that neither the Rector nor Tristan had any choice in what they did because they are the way Beckett wrote them. In a work of fiction the free will of all of the characters is, well, a fiction. This might suggest that a novel is a particularly unsuitable vehicle for exploring such philosophical terrain. Only real life is meaningful when it comes to questions of free will. If Beckett had taken the opposite course and written the scene so that the Rector failed, then the action, determined by the author, would have proved that Tristan had free will.

The question of free will versus determinism divides the world into two classes of people, the observers and the observed. From the point of view of the observer, the observed may or may not have free will. It is arguable that they don’t, at least to the extent that behaviour is initiated by neurological processes that can be observed in the brain before the person whose brain it is becomes conscious of them. From a scientific perspective, one that focuses on physical explanations, human behaviour is, in principle, reducible to processes that are either random or caused. If they are caused, then they are, again in principle, predictable. If they are random, they aren’t. Free will, on the other hand, operates within a point of view where thoughts are thought and decisions are made. Thus, no matter what conclusions we draw about the observed person, the observer always has free will. The behaviour of the characters is determined by the free will of the author. There are metafictional opportunities here that Beckett does not take up. Instead, he limits himself by continuing to work within the classical frame of the argument.

Tristan is crippled by the thought that he does not have free will and the cunning twist at the end turns on his last desperate attempt to prove his freedom. The relationship between the various layers of the plot is subtle and carefully worked. The various storylines are skilfully handled and offer a series of surprises as the reader gradually discovers that not only the characters themselves but also the whole world of the novel is not what it seems. In the end I felt disappointed that writing of this quality was devoted to such a limited exposition of the philosophical question. August, I felt, was a better novel than Genesis but poorer philosophy.

CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.

Holding the Baby

August 1, 2011 1 Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, by Tina Makereti (Huia Publishers, 2010)

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka Tina. Ka nui te pai tau pakiwaitara kei konei.

I enjoyed this initial collection of tales by Tina Makereti. It’s refreshing, rarely boring, easy to read. The stories rebound and resound with echoes from one to the other, motifs recur as time and legend intertwine in a patterning of melded possibilities and possible meldings.

The quick stick label is ‘magic realism’: Makereti’s craft is in veneering extra-sensory perceptions and other-worldliness onto quotidian contingency. Her quotidian, in turn, is permeated with marginalisations of ethnicity and gender. There is a Borges-like quality to some tales – as in Eli’s massive polyglottism in the god child, which brings to mind Funes the Memorious. Eli also hears the sounds of thoughts. There is the synaesthesia of seeing colour in words in off-beat; while Rosie listens to the talk of inanimate objects in blink. The analogue of Kirlian photography – the suggestion of ghostly auras – segues everywhere in this collection; that is, there is an ambient aura around many of the main protagonists, while dream-like states also billow within narratives, flowing through, for example, top-knot and shapeshifter.

Maori mythology is ever-present, albeit in contemporaneous settings (in Maoritanga, past and present are all one anyway), as for example the way in which the mountains and rivers animate the kuia, her tipuna, her mokopuna in kaitiaki. Everything integrates ki te ao o nga iwi Maori; it’s only the one-dimensional Pakeha boyfriends sketched into these stories who are given to prate such lines as, ‘Perhaps there are things humanity is not aware of’, and ‘It’s just, the world’s so huge, you know? The universe is a freakin’ crazy place and I know nothing about it.’ Tina Makereti senses and depicts the Other as always here. Her magic realism is actually our true diurnal ethos. In effect, she is more a mirror to the Maori experience than she is a second-hand Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. She is one who senses the atua as well as the kehua everywhere. Her stories transmogrify into purakau. The marginal becomes mainstream.

So Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is always around the corner here: as in the tales top-knot, ahi, mokomoko – maybe also via the lizard king allusions in blink. Pania of the Reef scores her own anthropomorphic role in shapeshifter. And, of course, the lead-off piece is a clever reciting/re-siting of Tane Mahuta claymaking Hineahuone, after his schisms with Tumatauenga, in skin and bones. Tihei mauriora indeed: a heart-starter to get the collection pumping, eh.

So also, the whanau situations – growing up in broken homes, broken in more ways than one. Lack of pingers. Lack of love. Lack of food. Violence. Too much piss being drunk. Being a whangai. Being a solo Mum. Losing babies. Loser (Pakeha) boyfriends with grabby hands and grubby potential-to-impregnate. Lack of many male role-models. Multi-generational fluxes and flows. Dying with whanau me whanaunga around, and then the tangi. Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is essentially about growing up Maori. Just bite into what men do. Savour kaitiaki. Taste the textures in the order of things. Chew on in the end – which, of course, just has to be the last tale in this book, detailing the tangential aspects of tangi.

And what after death but to begin again? After all: ‘There was a woman and a man/there was a man and a woman’ are the words, the thematic words, which not only fuse the cycle of the single story the order of things, but also iterate the cyclical nature of the entire collection.

Furthermore, this is a woman’s book, making it all the more powerful. By this I mean that the book is about female-centred experience: babies, birth, sex (frustrated or enjoyed), best friends (as in off-beat for example), best friends as (twin) sisters in mokomoko and tree, the rabbit and the moon – and the strong bonding thus involved. But even more crucial than all this is the blight and plight of male–female relationships – where the woman, all too often, is left – quite literally – holding the baby, though sometimes voluntarily. For, as Pania reflects: ‘Sometimes I think men just take what they want.’ Which is also why some stories meander, dribble into flaccidity; the relationship entailed was also going nowhere, and it is the woman left staunch or staunching.

All this combined thematic interplay is manifested most clearly in mokomoko, where the strands of Maori wahine in relation to Maui, of madness in relation to men (husband-fathers), of birth/death in relation to dreaming, all weave together. The underlying viewpoint of Makereti’s whole anthology is the one Hine-nui-te-po articulates: ‘There would always be this thing between men and women, both grappling with their fear, both loving and maiming and making a mess of it all. Even the gods made mistakes.’

One sister here learns how to exist again from her twin talking Hine’s story – just as Makereti talks tales, so as to reveal that their telling might indicate states of mind beyond just blather: ‘there was a way of understanding the world that went beyond words … the quiet place … was more real than all the words uttered in Babel.’ In the end, it is Makereti’s gift that her pakiwaitara convey the possibility of a transcendent silence.

Kia ora ano mo te taonga.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living and teaching in Hong Kong.

The Melon Cow Lick and the Coin Boy

August 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Christine Johnston
Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall (Penguin Books, 2011, $30)

It’s a long time since I read a novel where the narrative voice is the outstanding and most memorable feature, perhaps even the whole point of the literary enterprise. Charlotte Randall has created a likeable, though at times obtuse, first-person narrator, a Maori boy, making his way solo in the West Coast gold rush, like a child in a story by Charles Dickens. (Hokitika Town is subtitled ‘Life as a West Coast coin boy’. Who or what was a ‘coin boy’, I wondered – a child who dived for coins under a Rotorua bridge, perhaps? Wrong. Halfie, our narrator, doesn’t dive but can see the benefits of currency in the Pakeha world and goes after it in ways that are all his own.)

Charlotte Randall is an adventurous writer, not afraid to take on ambitious projects. Her second novel, The Curative (2000), featured William Lonsdale, as sane as the day is long, but incarcerated in London’s notorious Bedlam asylum in the early nineteenth century and undergoing horrendous cures for lunacy. It was an imaginative tour de force, winning considerable acclaim in New Zealand and overseas.

Subsequent novels have proved to be unpredictable in subject matter and scope: a retelling of the Faust story set in the world of professional tennis (Within the Kiss) and then a work that traced a present-day Petone family back to 1650s Oxford (What Happen Then, Mr Bones?). Hokitika Town, Randall’s sixth novel, starts as it means to go on:

I never seen nothing like this. Papa say whitey do things different from us, but he dint say how. Now I see it with my own eyes. Whitey’s ships is so big they choking up the river. Them ships got poles big as kauri trees and the poles got cloaks hanging off them. Mebee no one believe that back home, but I swear – whitey’s ships wear clothings.

The author uses Halfie’s narrative as expressed in his ever-improving ‘pidgin’ English to carry the story and to flesh out his personality. The words of other more articulate characters are written conventionally. Thus, while Ludovic says, ‘Sad? I’m not sad. I’m melancholic’, narrator Halfie writes ‘I melon cow lick.’

This use of language is inventive but presents its own challenges and irritations, especially when combined with a naive, often blundering, child-narrator, a big cast of characters (many endowed with given names and nicknames of Halfie’s invention), a frantic pace and an episodic structure. I didn’t always know what was going on and I felt uneasy at times. Was I laughing at Halfie or with him? Was Randall creating a kind of ‘Uncle Tom’ by attributing limited and idiosyncratic English to her protagonist? How would the Maori reader feel? (This reviewer was perhaps too squeamish.)

At first the writing style is an obstruction but the reader adapts and is soon powering through the streets of Hokitika and the cut-over bush with Halfie and the cast of eccentrics, as the pace of events quickens. There’s a lot going on, but it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees.

The question that kept raising its head was ‘why’?

Halfie is always tearing off to earn a coin or avert a disaster, thereby creating several more, and we are with him one hundred-per-cent because he is a uniquely engaging protagonist. His broader motivation, however, remains mysterious. Why has he turned his back on his Maori ways and thrown in his lot with a bunch of such unattractive characters? Why does he stay with the alcoholic Ludovic, cleaning up vomit and keeping the hut tidy? Why does he care so much about the fate of Violet’s unborn child?

What distinguishes this novel also limits it. An articulate narrator might provide more hints for the reader. As it is, we are left to wonder. Even some ‘facts’ of this fiction remain blurry. Is Fortunatus a philanthropist or paedophile? It matters, surely?

While fragments of Halfie’s past emerge from time to time, they are not easy to grasp or put together in a coherent picture. His present tense is more compelling – the urge or the necessity to earn a few coins, to fill his belly and have a roof over his head in wet Westland, to be true to his friends and to outwit his enemies. Halfie is cunning enough to take matters into his own hands, often with unintended and calamitous results. He has our sympathy but he’s no angel: he tells lies, gets drunk on beer and high on painkillers. How old is he, I found myself wondering. Old enough to fall in love, apparently.

What drives the novel forwards? In some sense it’s Violet’s pregnancy that creates a time frame around which life surges. Whatever else happens, her belly is expanding and this is bound to cause trouble. Violet, a skivvy at the Bathsheba hotel, has befriended Halfie, helping him with his English and explaining the politics of Hokitika. She imagines herself to be more worldly-wise than her protégé, but is soon a girl in trouble with no one to lean on but Halfie. He can see what she can’t: that it will all end in tears. I found the episode of her giving birth less than plausible. Wouldn’t she seek out an older woman to assist her rather than a lad she already has grave doubts about?

The novel has drama that always threatens to boil over into melodrama in the Wild West tradition. There is One Eye and his gang versus the Gold Escort; parties, balls, and ‘bunfights’ at the Bathsheba pub; and Griffith’s messy demise. More rounded and satisfying characters include alcoholic Ludovic, the pious ‘philosopher’, and his nemesis – Kaspar Schmidt, atheist and free-thinker. Needless to say, their ideological disputes are largely lost on Halfie.

Some characters – the publican and his wife, for instance, who seem grotesquely unsympathetic in the first half of the novel – mellow into humanity as the story goes on. (Mr Flewelling used to confine his wife in a drugged state in her bedroom.) Towards the novel’s end there arises a ‘happy families’ atmosphere that is heart-warming but seems at odds with what has gone before.

Still, this is a novel with heart and the reader can only rejoice that Violet’s baby brings out the best in people. Halfie has turned things around. Randall has created a character who may baffle the reader, but there is no doubt that he engages our sympathy. In the end, wanting to be known by his Maori name Tiwakawaka, he embarks on a new adventure with a more purposeful and rejuvenated Ludovic:

Ludo take my shoulders and turn me to look at him. He put a palm on each of my cheeks. They rilly cold. Then he say I a boy that bring sunshine to his soul.

CHRISTINE JOHNSTON is a Dunedin writer. She has written novels, short stories and essays.

Siege Symphony

July 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Graeme Lay
The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley (Vintage, 2011), 303 pp., $39.99.

Sarah Quigley’s fourth novel opens with a small but ominous harbinger. In the spring of 1941, the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is informed by his friend, music teacher Ivan Sollertinsky, that two German diplomats have cancelled suit orders with Leningrad’s most reputable tailor. The signal is significant – as the German diplomats are leaving the city and returning to Berlin, it seems that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 is about to collapse. After it does, in mid-summer 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and lay siege to Leningrad, bringing ghastly privations to the city’s civilian population.

Within this hideous environment Shostakovich (1906-1975) composes his Seventh Symphony, a personal magnum opus which will be broadcast by the Soviet authorities in order to sustain the morale of the population. Shostakovich has for some time had an uneasy relationship with Stalin’s regime, but is tolerated because of his popularity with the people. As Sollertinsky remarks to Shostakovich, after the composer has called him a ‘masterful dissembler’: ‘We both know that dissemblers live longer than dissidents’.

Karl Eliasberg, the unmarried conductor of the below-par Leningrad Radio Orchestra, lives in an apartment with his nagging, petulant mother. He worships Shostakovich, who is everything he is not. Eliasberg is an insecure loner whose own musicians barely tolerate him. Neurotic and a stammerer, he seems incapable of conducting even a Leningrad tramcar. Closer to Shostakovich is violinist Nikolai Nikolayev, a widower and father of a beloved nine-year-old, Sonya, a promising cellist. Another precious possession of the Nikolayev family is Sonya’s cello, a Storioni, which the girl plays during her birthday celebrations, drawing sincere praise from Shostakovich.

The siege intensifies. Leningrad is garrotted by the German Army and blitzed mercilessly by the Luftwaffe. Although most of the city’s leading musicians are evacuated to the Far East of the USSR, Shostakovich stays, digging ditches and fire-watching from the rooftops by day, then working through the night on his symphony. Barely tolerated by Nina, his long-suffering wife, he subsists on bread, vodka and cigarettes.

Dread sets in among Leningrad’s citizens, who know that the bitter winter is looming. The city’s children, including Sonya, are evacuated by train to the countryside. This causes anguish for Nikolai, whose grief becomes unbearable when he hears that the train his young daughter was on has been bombed and derailed by the Germans.

Under the most constrained of circumstances, Shostakovich labours on with his composition, shutting himself away in his room and cutting himself off from the demands of his family. Close to despair, the composer wonders, ‘When would life stop getting in the way of music?’ At the same time, poor Eliasberg tries to cope with his rebellious orchestra as well as the querulous demands of his mother.

While the siege, the bitter winter and starvation beset Leningrad’s inhabitants, the novel’s central characters – Shostakovich, Eliasberg and Nikolayev – confront their various demons. Shostakovich wonders if he can possibly finish his symphony. Even sheet paper on which to write his score is almost unobtainable. Nikolayev grieves for his lost daughter, painfully regretful that he ever sent her away. His sister, Tanya, threatens to barter Sonya’s priceless cello for food. Eliasberg struggles to cope with his disintegrating orchestra, whose oboeist, Alexander, is openly contemptuous of him.

The privations of the people of Leningrad have become so extreme that even the corpses of the dead are stripped for food. The horrors of the siege, the wrecking of innocent bodies and the desperation of people driven to live like foraging animals is vividly evoked. Eliasberg is close to despair: ‘In the long winter weeks that followed, he crawled through the days half-blinded by grief and rage. The frozen city splintered under the German shells, and bodies piled up at the sides of Nevsky Prospect. Stick-thin women stumbled to the Neva and drew water through holes drilled in the ice. Because Elias’s vision was failing, he tried to make sense of the disintegrating world by listening to it. What sounds did he hear? The grating of sled-runners loaded with corpses. Huge explosions as mass burial pits were created with dynamite. The howls of stray dogs and cats, slaughtered by Leningraders desperate for meat’.

When Eliasberg is able to provide a grateful Shostakovich with score paper, the conductor comes closer to his hero. The Soviet authorities then arrange for Shostakovich and his family to be evacuated, taking them far from the conflict so that Dimitri can finish his composition. Completed from afar, the score is flown over the German lines and back into Leningrad. Now it is over to Eliasberg and his pitiful orchestra to rehearse, and eventually perform Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.

Unexpectedly but heroically, Eliasberg rises to this extreme challenge. Freed from the hungry clutches of his mother, supported by a lovely, wounded ballerina, Nina Bronnikova, he overcomes his self-pity, learns to love and be loved, and becomes resolute in his determination to do justice to the composer he so admires. Shostakovich now being off-stage, Eliasberg moves to the forefront of the narrative and justifies his role in capturing the novel’s title.

With its assured characterisation and trenchant dialogue, and informed by the author’s musical background (Quigley has played cello herself), The Conductor’s narrative begins slowly but gathers movement, momentum and intensity. The sometimes bitchy world of the professional musician provides a chorus to the story. Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky come in for some scathing comments, and even the master, Shostakovich himself, is accused by Eliasberg at one stage of ‘referencing other works’, in the Russian’s case, Ravel. The novel then builds to a tantalising crescendo in which the final movement – the broadcast of the symphony – is delectably anticipated. Eliasberg is on the podium.

‘When he cranes slightly forward, he can see a row of microphones pointed like guns towards the stage, ready to catch the Leningrad Symphony and broadcast it to the world. He takes a deep breath and steps into the blaze of electric light, far brighter than any sun. Sweat leaps on his back, the orchestra rises to its feet, and the audience also stands, a dark gleaming mass of military badges and medals, and pearls.’ Art is about to triumph over war, death and destruction.

There are a few jarring notes in The Conductor. Characters bite their lips, tongues, and roll their eyes, rather too frequently, while the use of the contemporary words ‘recycled’ and ‘inappropriate’ are out of register for scenes occurring in 1942. But these are relatively minor linguistic quibbles.

Originally from Christchurch, the recipient of a Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellowship in 1998 and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency in 2000, Quigley has lived in Berlin for the past eleven years. This European experience has been put to good use. The Conductor is by any standards a remarkable novel. Works of fiction depicting classical music and musicians are notoriously difficult to transfer to the pages of a novel, yet by credibly transforming Eliasberg from underdog to hero, Quigley succeeds in validating the conductor’s veneration of Shostakovich and at the same time provides the novel with a hearteningly upbeat conclusion. And to fill any imaginative musical vacuums from which the reader may suffer, the novel comes with a CD of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. Ambitious in its conception and stunningly executed, The Conductor is a work of truly international stature.

GRAEME LAY is an Auckland-based reviewer, writer and editor. His recent books include the non-fiction work In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific and the novel Alice & Luigi.