Rachel Seiffert: Field Study

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

In The Dark Room, Seiffert captured an enormous audience (and a place on the Booker shortlist) with her spare, careful study of three Germans affected in different ways by World War II.

In it, she insisted that history was not carried out just by "Hitler and Eichmann and whoever", but by "the real, everyday people".

In the third segment of that book, her character Micha, at the end of the 20th century, investigated the truth of his grandfather's role in the war. Fifty years had gone by, yet for Micha the personal implications of that time were still potent and tangible.

Field Study is a collection of short stories recognisably out of the same creative mill as The Dark Room.

The title suggests analytical investigation, a survey of what is, of cause and effect, but this time the subject or "field" is not war, but something broader - history and economics, human life as it exists in the channels and marshes between great, reportable world events.

Her subjects are again "ordinary people", their lives shaped by forces they have no control over - by large chemical plants that pollute waterways, by lovelessness, by international capitalist conglomerations that destroy local economies, by the spiritual futility of worldly success, by hysterical paranoia over nameless fears, by the tearing down of barriers between East and West, by the memory of wartime atrocities.

"You can't bend the world to fit your plan, I'm afraid," a Polish man tells a young boy angry because his mother has gone away seeking work over the border in Germany.

A young American woman confronts the complications of "Germanness and all its secrets" when she marries the son of an East German communist who had fought against Hitler yet become a Stasi informer under the postwar regime.

A couple living on an unnamed European housing estate must cope with the mysterious hysteria of their 3-year-old, who can't pass the end of their street without going rigid and screaming.

An old man, a beekeeper, tries for the first time in his life to leave the valley he lives in, to seek help for a child who has arrived, frozen, on his doorstep.

A young man wants only to create a home for himself and his pregnant girlfriend, but finds the world won't bend to accommodate his simple dream.

These are not comfortable stories, but they do confirm Seiffert as a writer of powerful, lean prose - sentences condense to phrases; dialogue is minimal and much is left unsaid - that goes straight to the core of modern existence.

Don't expect happy endings - Seiffert's characters simply vanish back into the historical continuum, leaving just a sombre echo of the personal and political truths they have shown us.

William Heinemann, $45 (hardcover)