Literary Miscellany Editorial by Glenn Patterson
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Editoral by Glenn Patterson -UT July 09
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The more I read the more certain I am I don’t know anything worth the knowing about books
(Bad news this for anyone who has just signed up for an MA in Creative Writing at Queen's. Good news: Ian Sansom is there too.) The novel I have just finished reading, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, ought to be a disaster. Nearly 600 pages in length it was written in only twenty-four post-war days by an author in the grip of a morphine and alcohol addiction, and it shows. Whole chapters read like first draft, with frequent repetitions, switches in tense, and phrases that grate rather than sing. The reader, I told myself not infrequently, could be forgiven for setting the book aside before the first fifty pages are up. The reader, I have reminded myself not infrequently since, could instead turn his attention to a better-ordered novel and in so doing miss some of the most extraordinary and inspiring characters in modern European literature.
The plot centres on the residents of a Berlin apartment block and the decision taken by one middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, on learning, in the novel's opening pages, that their only son, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, has been killed in the German invasion of France. To say more would be to spoil the story, something I'd rather leave to the flyleaf. (If I know nothing about books I know still less about the minds of publishers.) Besides, although it is marketed as a thriller, it is those characters that really stick in the mind, and what is crucial, it seems to me, is that few of them are wholly without merit, or for that matter, flaws. The Quangels are as unlikely -to begin with close to unlikeable -a pair of heroes as ever shuffled through the pages of a novel, but they are made of a substance whose strength only becomes apparent under conditions of enormous stress. That is the genius of their creator. And, who knows, maybe that is the sort of intense intimacy that only comes of writing a novel in three and a half weeks.
Writers are sometimes asked which work of fiction they would like to have written, to which I usually reply that you can't have the work without the life that gave rise to it. You would not wish Hans Fallada's life on an enemy, encompassing as it did not just destructive addictions but also imprisonment, depression, and botched suicides. It was also, even by the standards of the day, very brief. He died, aged 56, in February 1947 weeks before his final novel was published. All the same it is difficult to read Alone in Berlin without experiencing if not envy then gratitude that a life so fraught left behind a work so great. Read it. You'll see what I mean.
Glenn Patterson
The plot centres on the residents of a Berlin apartment block and the decision taken by one middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, on learning, in the novel's opening pages, that their only son, a soldier in the Wehrmacht, has been killed in the German invasion of France. To say more would be to spoil the story, something I'd rather leave to the flyleaf. (If I know nothing about books I know still less about the minds of publishers.) Besides, although it is marketed as a thriller, it is those characters that really stick in the mind, and what is crucial, it seems to me, is that few of them are wholly without merit, or for that matter, flaws. The Quangels are as unlikely -to begin with close to unlikeable -a pair of heroes as ever shuffled through the pages of a novel, but they are made of a substance whose strength only becomes apparent under conditions of enormous stress. That is the genius of their creator. And, who knows, maybe that is the sort of intense intimacy that only comes of writing a novel in three and a half weeks.
Writers are sometimes asked which work of fiction they would like to have written, to which I usually reply that you can't have the work without the life that gave rise to it. You would not wish Hans Fallada's life on an enemy, encompassing as it did not just destructive addictions but also imprisonment, depression, and botched suicides. It was also, even by the standards of the day, very brief. He died, aged 56, in February 1947 weeks before his final novel was published. All the same it is difficult to read Alone in Berlin without experiencing if not envy then gratitude that a life so fraught left behind a work so great. Read it. You'll see what I mean.
Glenn Patterson
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