Stevan Eldred-Grigg: Kaput!

By DAVID HILL

Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing.

Here he is now with a novel of a conventional, domestic woman's life in Nazi Germany, where reality hazes into horror or soars into surrealism.

The title? It's the collapsing condition of Berlin as the Second World War progresses. Slowly, then with appalling speed, a civilisation disintegrates. Systems and supplies, families and relationships, language and thought corrode and crumble.

One of Eldred-Grigg's accomplishments is to show how such a decline begins. Small worms of propaganda, apparently no more sinister than advertising jingles, burrow away. Ostensibly wholesome measures accumulate - uniformed boys saluting women with Motherhood Medals; trade unions banned "for the sake of an orderly workplace"; shop signs declaring "Painted Women will not be served".

While it happens, Betty the hausfrau tries to live her life. It's a decent, obedient life, and both these virtues help to destroy her.

History pendulums past, counterpointed by ordinary stories. Poland is invaded. Hitler rants in his funny Austrian accent. Betty takes little Hilde to visit her gaudy Gran as Norway and France fall. The British begin to bomb, and "subhumans" - Russian prisoners - work as slaves. Betty and her sisters and the kids go to the park, where one bench is marked "Only For Jews". The air-raids grow in terror.

Its a big story. A packed and headlong story, urged along by a bustling present tense. Sometimes it becomes helter-skelter. Many times it becomes a bit embarrassed by its attempts to render Berlin working-class patois via mock-cockney speech.

Eldred-Grigg the social historian (he'll loathe the term, but it fits) shows again his deftness with domestic details. The apartment lives of Mittelstrasse are meticulously evoked.

It's a touch too meticulous on occasions. We get some pretty solid blocks of Berlin topography, cinematography, et al. The plot pauses while the stage is set. And it's set very stylishly; like all good novels, this is a book about a time.

It comes with claims that it's a major step, the first novel by a leading New Zealand writer to be available from an electronic publisher.

Alas, its cover is flimsy and pallid; its paper is glassy and its print sometimes blurry. The accompanying blurbs and reviews are uniformly fatuous. If I worked for the traditional houses of the conventional publishing industry disparagingly referred to, I'd sleep pretty easy.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.

* This book can be ordered at www.1stbooks.com. The website is an electronic version of vanity publishing dubbed by its founders publication on demand (POD). The site claims to have sold 150,000 books and lists 6000 authors. However, the website does not edit text or subject potential books to editors for assessment. As the site states: "1stBooks Library does not make value judgments about the literary merit of books, nor edits manuscripts for style or content. The author decides what the public reads, and the public decides if it makes good reading or not." Which could be called either electronic democracy in action or a chance to see what authors can do with unbridled egos.

1st Books $US6.95

downloaded, $US14.95