James Wray: The right side of sleep

By JENNY JONES

One of the many delights of this novel is Wray's willingness to invent for the sake of verisimilitude. Writing in English about German-speaking characters living in 1938, Wray has to solve the problem of how to represent idiom that appears true to its time and place.

He audaciously creates expressions that sound like German translations, which are all the more powerful for being unfamiliar.

Throughout the novel, Wray displays this kind of instinct for knowing when to invent and for memorably embedding the political in the personal.

Though he has clearly done his research, much of the political is underexplained as we follow the teenage hero, Oskar Voxlauer, from his traumatising part in World War I to his return home more than 20 years later.

His native Austrian village is described in exquisite detail, while the truth about how it has changed in the lead-up to its annexation to the German Reich is conveyed parsimoniously, creating an air of menace that envelops Voxlauer and his lover Else Bauer like an inexorable fog.

Characters emerge from the fog to deal to Voxlauer or his mother or the Jewish hotel-owner and recede into it again.

While we ponder the meaning and probable outcome of the exchange, we are transported back in time to Voxlauer's first love affair in the Ukraine where he embraced Bolshevism to avoid punishment for desertion.

Suddenly a co-narrator emerges, Else's cousin Kurt. A Black Shirt anxious for glory, his anti-Semitism is a useful tool for his own advancement. This, Wray seems to be telling us, lay behind much of what passed for being deeply rooted hatred.

The understatement of the novel is probably its greatest narrative strength. The dialogue, though formal, is agile and witty. The reader is always encouraged to bring perception and insight to the words on the page.

Wray, an American, is 30. The Right Side of Sleep took shape in a Brooklyn basement. Wray had no day job, no relationship, was in a morbid frame of mind - and free to write.

The result is a haunting, memorable novel full of delights for the lover of language; characters and places are richly created and the whole adds much to our ability to grasp how peaceful, orderly lives can unravel to reveal the darkest side of human potential.

The air of menace is so strong that by the end it seems almost immaterial whether Voxlauer is actually murdered: menace is the reality and menace is what induces people to put up with the increasing arbitrariness of their lives.

Vintage

$26.95