Varying views of Holocaust legacy

By STEPHANIE MISKELL

WAR STORY

By Glen Edelman

Allen & Unwin


THE QUARTET

By Francois Emmanuel

Review $39.95


These two novels share much in common. Both explore the ongoing emotional ramifications of the Holocaust for individuals some 50 years after the event.

Both have been compared with Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. Short, intense novels, they present their stories through the perspectives of characters who learn of the experiences of those affected.

There the similarity ends. For all the grimness of its subject, War Story, by American poet Gwen Edelman, is an immensely pleasurable read, a messy, sensual celebration of life. The Quartet by Belgian psychiatrist Francois Emmanuel is a chilling indictment of the awful extremes of human behaviour.

War Story is a love story. American writer Kitty is on her way by train to Amsterdam to attend the funeral of Joseph, a man with whom she had a passionate affair some years earlier. Joseph, an Austrian Jew 30 years Kitty's senior, was a brilliant writer of searing plays and novels which sought to articulate the unspeakableness of the final solution. A 12-year-old at the onset of war, he was separated from his parents and survived on his wits, ending up in Palestine in 1946.

His unrelenting memories of loss and deprivation fuel his lifelong appetites (women, food) and creative force. They also condemn him to a life of restless agony. His relationship with Kitty is energised as much by his stories as by their sexual connection. The stories are compelling. Joseph is a glorious creation: earthy, crude, exasperating, perceptive, tender, funny, tragic.

While Kitty is close to Joseph as his lover and protege, the narrator in The Quartet has a role more like Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Corporate psychologist Simon is given the task to investigate the causes of the deteriorating mental state of the managing director of a French subsidiary of a German multinational industrial company.

The mystery at the heart of this book is banal and unthinkable. Simon gradually realises he is looking into more than the mind of one troubled man. He is looking into the abyss, akin to the horror seen by Conrad's Colonel Kurtz.

Simon seeks the truth of the past through a series of cryptic clues. His wish to remain an uninvolved eyewitness is futile. He is powerless to prevent his imagination constructing the final Goya-like vision that is the book's overpowering climax.

Much is left to the reader to decipher: the connections are never fully explained.

War Story and The Quartet are seriously good novels, absorbing and unsettling. I recommend both unreservedly.

* Stephanie Miskell teaches English at Northcote College.