Lawrence Norfolk: In the Shape of a Boar

By ELSPETH SANDYS

Lawrence Norfolk's first two novels - Lemprieres Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinoceros - received such high praise that it would be difficult to approach another of his novels with anything but high expectations. The Guardian has described Norfolk as Britain's best young writer and the Observer puts him ahead of everyone in his generation.

When I read that In the Shape of a Boar deals in part with the Greek myth of the hunt for the Kalydonian boar, and with the Nazi occupation of Greece, I knew I had to read it.

Imagine my disappointment when I opened the book and was confronted by footnotes. On page after page the text is dwarfed into insignificance by extensive and almost unreadable references.

Eventually, the footnotes disappear, only to return in part two, when a long poem written by hero Solomon Memel (one of the many questions this novel raises is: what is a hero?) is reprinted in a highly annotated version by an obscure publisher in Tel Aviv.

The purpose of the footnotes is to cast doubt on the poems and, by implication, the poet's authenticity.

Later still, it's revealed that the person responsible for the new edition is Solomon's friend from pre-war days, Jakob Feuerstein.

Why Feuerstein chose to attack his old friend is never explained. The question "What is friendship?" (like "What is a hero?") is simply left unanswered.

Complications abound. The hunt for the Nazi commander Heinrich Eberhardt, who in the wake of the German withdrawal in 1944 ordered terrible reprisals, takes place in the same mountains as the hunt for the Kalydonian boar in prehistoric times.

In both stories there is a woman warrior. In the Greek myth, as recounted by Norfolk, it is Atalanta who strikes the first blow against the boar. In the 20th-century story, Thyella (Anastasia Kosta) hunts the German boar Eberhardt. But does she kill it? And did Atalanta kill the boar that the gods had sent to punish the King of Kalydon, or was the real killer one of the two men hunting with her?

Thyella also has two men at her side - her lover, Xanthos, and the mysterious escaper from Nazi-occupied Romania, Solomon Memel.

On two occasions after being captured - first by Greek partisans, then by the Germans - a revolver is put into Solomon's hands. But we are never told whether he uses it.

And did he kill Oberfeldkommandant Eberhardt?

The most important question the novel asks is about truth. Is Solomon's poem true? Was he where he says he was during the war? Did the events he describes in his poem really happen?

The author comments at the end of part one that for every history limping along behind its confused posterity there is another which consumes itself.

This novel is too self-conscious and too academic in its approach. It asks a number of important questions, but answers none of them.

It concludes with these words: "Our memories never tell us the stories we need. Our heroes never live the lives we require. Their acts take place in darkness and silence and their untellable stories rest with them in the cave."

Telling stories, Norfolk seems to be saying, is a hopeless exercise because we can never know if they are true.

For a novelist, and an important one at that, to feel such hopelessness about his profession troubles me deeply. Perhaps the novel, like the Kalydonian boar, really is doomed.

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

$34.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.