Hard times for the little man

Germany in 1932 is both the setting and the place/time for the writing of Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now?, but the artistically enhanced realism depicting a rather nice young couple trying to make ends meet while the economy crashes around them rings alarm bells today (and no doubt always has since then, in some parts of the world). Unemployment had risen since 1929 from 1.4 million to 6 million, wages had fallen by 50 per cent and social welfare was in tatters, a bureaucratic system made it difficult if not impossible for the poor to claim their dues - and Hitler was poised to take power, most plausible (for some) of a bad bunch of politicians.


All photos of 1932 here courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, which has a huge selection on Wikimedia Commons. The writing on the wall in the tenement shot up top, between the Nazi and communist flags, reads 'first food, then rent' - a slight ringing of the changes on Brecht's 'erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral' ('first comes a full stomach, then come ethics').


Not that you'd really be aware of the ultimate stormcloud about to burst in 1933 from the little world of Fallada's novel, apart from the presence of the odd Nazi in various institutions. The focus is on the personal realm in which the novel's hero, Pinneberg, and his adorable young wife Lammchen (no umlaut in the English translation), almost exclusively exist, though her backbone seems to come from a politically committed family. Quickly recovering from the news that Lammchen's pregnant, they marry and move to Berlin to lodge - at a cost - with Pinneberg's louche mother, soon find they have to flee to more secluded lodging, and depend on the young man's job as a very good salesman in a department store. The couple will have to mind every mark - it's no mere social documentation that Lammchen draws up a meticulous sheet of expenses - even if they want something as basic as an evening out (though they do go to the cinema, and see a film that's anything but escapist).


Emma Pinneberg, sweet-natured Lammchen, is one of the most plausible good characters in any novel, with a core of steel and an unassailable sense of what's just and fair. Her husband is more complex, if not necessarily more interesting, and many of the most striking passages in the novel deal with his sense of, and sensitivity to, the insecurity of his position. There's a troubling early scene where the doting husband, having just got a job thanks to the string-pulling of his mother's dodgy lover, stands in a desolate autumnal Kleine Tiergarten among the unemployed waiting for they know not what.


Externally, he didn't belong to them, his outer shell was smart. He was wearing the reddish-brown winter ulster that Bergmann [his previous employer in a provincial town] had let him have for thirty-eight marks, and the hard black hat, also one of Bergmann's, no longer completely in fashion, the brim's too wide, so shall we say three marks twenty, Pinneberg?

Externally, then, Pinneberg did not belong to the unemployed, but internally...

He had just been to see Lehmann, the head of Personnel at Mandel's department store; he had gone to get a job and he'd got one, it was a simple commercial transaction. But as a result of this transaction Pinneberg had the feeling, despite the fact that he was to become a wage-earner again, that he was much closer to these non-earners than to people who earned a great deal. He was one of them, any day he could find himself standing here among them, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had no protection.

He was one of millions. Ministers made speeches to him, enjoined him to tighten his belt, to make sacrifices, to feel German, to put his money in the savings-bank and to vote for the constitutional party.

Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't, according to the circumstances, but he didn't beliecve what they said. Not in the least. His innermost conviction was: they all want something from me, but not for me. It's all the same whether I live or die. They couldn't care less whether I can afford to go to the cinema or not, whether Lammchen can get proper food or has too much excitement, whether the Shrimp [the child they're expecting] is happy or miserable. Nobody gives a damn.

And all these people standing around in the Little Tiergarten, and a real zoo it was, full of proletarian animals rendered harmless by lack of food and lack of hope, they shared the same fate. Three months' unemployment and - goodbye, reddish-brown overcoat! Goodbye to any prospects for the future! Jachmann [his mother's lover] and Lehmann could have a quarrel on Wednesday evening and suddenly I'll be worthless again.

Despite the hopeless tone here, and the notion that you carry the seeds of your own failure if you perceive it despondently from the start, there's some humour throughout. Not least when Pinneberg's distinguished fellow-salesman takes him along to a naturist evening at a local baths and, in a marvellous tragicomic scene, he has a melancholy conversation with a stocky Jewish middle-aged lady who sadly and matter-of-factly tells him of the daily abuse she faces. The scenes of Pinneberg's anxiety when Lammchen stumbles to hospital to give birth and the awkward domesticity with the Shrimp are charming, too.


As is Lammchen, always - real enough not to be too good to be true.

Fallada must have drawn all this from a life which had even more severe problems that Pinneberg's, though it seems he was never on the breadline in the same way. I can imagine this would make a marvellous TV adaptation, as it's mostly dialogue. There was indeed a 1934 American film starring Margaret Sullavan, which I'd love to see, even though I imagine it must be compromised in some details.


That as much as anything, due to its Jewish artistic team, counted against Fallada in the eyes of the Nazi regime. And then, of course, we have the terrifying but always human picture of Alone in Berlin. This author is one of the greats, Tolstoyan in the way that seemingly unsympathetic characters become more likeable when you least expect it. Ultimately it's the humanity of the central couple and the way they face their vicissitudes - or, in Pinneberg's case, don't always face them - that makes Little Man, What Now? unique.

Himmel über Berlin

That, of course, is how the Germans know Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, a film which so coloured my early trips to this ever-changing city. Funny how each return can be tinted, or tainted, by other second-hand impressions: this time I couldn't get away from the ruined horrors of 1945, courtesy of Fallada's Alone in Berlin and Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. To be honest, you don't have to look far beneath the shiny surface for signs of those times. Even the winged Victory, whose perch was also shared by Wenders's angels, is poised atop a sandstone-and-granite column heightened and moved by Hitler from outside the Reichstag to form the centrepiece of his east-west axis.

I suppose every city has its dualities, in any case: on the very day I was cycling through our own central greenlands and wondering at the new-budding trees, a body was fished out of the Serpentine. Cue diversionary snapshot.


Last Tuesday the weather in Berlin was so mild, if not as brilliant-blue as the above proves it soon was in London, that I gave up on museums and exhibitions, including an Ingmar Bergman special I really shouldn't have missed, and decided to walk from my hotel near the Philharmonie to Schloss Charlottenburg. I had four hours between my genial late-breakfast interview with Andrew Litton and the journey back to Schonefeld Airport, and it turned out to be quite a hike, by no means all of it pretty. From the leafing trees and wild flowers of the Tiergarten's south side




I crossed a couple of the roads meeting at the Siegessäule and found myself in a less salubrious woodland around the Fauler See. We're talking midday, but this zone was full of stunted and deformed eastern cruisers who kept on dropping out of the ugly tree. The hassle was so, well, I'll be frankly prudish and say disturbing, that I walked the rest of the way up to the Charlottenburger Tor along the road. Now there's another ugly beast for you, built in 1905 for the 200th anniversary of enlightened Queen Sophie Charlotte



but considerably adapted by Hitler in 1937 to make way for his military parades. A long walk up Otto Suhr Allee past very indifferent 1960s building brought me to a more fascinating monstrosity, Charlottenburg's Rathaus - still very much in use, so you can wander the vast corridors and the library with the rest of the area's inhabitants. This colossal pile, built by Heinrich Reinhardt and Georg Süßenguth between 1899 and 1905, shows all too clearly what the belle epoque meant to Prussia. But I do like some of the bas reliefs, and the ironwork above the left entrance is impressive.



It makes Schloss Charlottenburg, albeit heavily restored after 1945, seem all the more elegant. I've been here before, to see the Caspar David Friedrichs as well as Nefertiti when she was housed in one of the smaller museums to the south, but I wanted to compare and contrast late 17th-early 18th century Charlottenburg in spring with mid-17th-century Versailles in winter (would have gone to Potsdam, into which Frederick the Great channelled his energies, had there been more time - that I have yet to see). The south facade includes gilt railings to match Versailles (first shot)



and handsome trees


though the space before it can't compare to Versailles. Toyed with the original plan of going round Berggruen's collection of Picassos and Klees, now housed across the Spandauer Damm, but lunch called, so I stopped at the cafe of the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, with its intriguing-looking collection of fantastic art from Piranesi and Goya through to Magritte and Dubuffet.

The weather was now overcast but fair, so the Schlossgarten needed exploring.


There's an intriguing mausoleum, built to a neoclassical design by Gentz as a tomb for Queen Luise between 1810 and 1812, extended by the great Schinkel after the death of Friedrich Wilhelm III - that's his effigy below; Luise's is a finer work of art, but by that stage I realised I wasn't supposed to be photographing.


Presumably further touches are part of the 1890–91 extension to accommodate the graves of Wilhelm I and his wife Augusta. At any rate, it's a hotchpotch of styles, but not without grace in some of the details.


There was just time for a quick wander of the park. Beyond the formal gardens - which I'm delighted to see were indeed inspired by Le Notre's Versailles - the looser English style takes over; in fact the whole park looked like this after 1787, but following war damage the baroque portions were restored. At any rate the lakes tie in well with the distant Belvedere


and the palace proper looks handsome across the waters.


I suppose I should have followed what my guidebook described as the 'beauty and the beast' itinerary and gone to see the memorial on the site of Plötzensee, the slaughterhouse of political prisoners between 1933 and 1945. But time was up, so I took a brief detour along the Spree, with willows and cherry trees framing enormous factory chimneys, past a functional newish Russian orthodox church


and a monumental piece of wall-art


back to the Rathaus, Richard Wagner-Platz


and the U-bahn back. There was just time before taking the train to the airport to pay homage to another grim memorial, this time opposite the hotel, to Stauffenberg and the members of the German resistance who tried to overthrow Hitler in the July plot of 1944.


It's inside the yard of the Bendlerblock, former Nazi army headquarters, where they've also erected the statue of a defiant, chained naked man, worthier than the flatulent inscription on the ground in front.


I'm guessing that even this building had to be reconstructed after 1945. It's astonishing to see a photograph of Scharoun's Philharmonie, newly constructed in 1964, surrounded by open space and only a handful of semi-ruined edifices. Couldn't find this image on the web, nor on the Philharmonie's website - for which I sought permission in reproductions below - so will have to hope this poor copy of my postcard will suffice.


I didn't have time to see the museum within the Bendlerblock, but it's worth quoting inscription on the banner which is one of the exhibits, highlighting Pastor Martin Niemöller's wise words:

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I said nothing, for I was not a Communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing, for I was no Social Democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing, for I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no-one left to protest.

Now - he grandly proclaims - go away and read Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, and don't think of taking a jolly jaunt to Berlin until you've finished it.

Berlin 1923, Dostoyevsky-style

When did I last read a novelist who left me breathless across an epic span to know what was going to happen next, as I've just found with Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (Every Man Dies Alone) and now his Wolf Among Wolves? Probably when I was in my late teens, and devoured Dostoyevsky with such obsessiveness that my main studies at university were in danger of falling by the wayside (praise be to Russian Studies 1 and above all to Yelena Voznesenskaya, the only tutor who inspired me during those four years). I don't suppose the parallel had really occurred to me when I read Alone in Berlin, so singular and unrepeatable are the circumstances of its creation and the abysmal time it describes. Whereas Wolf Among Wolves brings us closer to the often fruitful vortices of restless 19th century Russia. The hero, Wolfgang Pagel, is a loveable but spineless young man who discovers his backbone once he leaves a chaotic inflation-ridden Berlin for a country estate which turns out to be no less full of different pitfalls. The roulette scenes in the city inevitably recalled the feverishness of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler (they're central to a first part which takes 370 densely-packed pages to describe an eventful 24 hours in Berlin). But I'd guess that the unease which spreads across the next couple of hundred pages out at Neulohe, leading up to the failed putsch - pictured below in archive footage of 1923's secret army - is a far more personal homage to the threat of something terrible in the ridiculous provincial society milieu of The Possessed. How can both Fallada and Dostoyevsky manage to be so gripping at times when, on the surface at least, not much is happening? The answer probably lies in the speed with which they wrote their tumbling prose, though Dostoyevsky's is often far less clear and makes him extremely difficult to read in Russian. Fallada knew he was risking his neck in the Berlin of 1936-7 for a novel which it was extremely risky to publish, pouring forth 123 pages a week. There is, of course, a magnificent tension both between the moral stature Pagel acquires by experience and the up-down trajectory of Fallada's fascinatingly tragic existence (I must read his biography), and in the contrast of the contented optimism at the novel's end with what we know would have been just around the corner for Pagel, his wife and their child. But this is, in any case, a book which lives in the moment, occasionally stopping to analyse and embroider. It is, above all, Fallada's incredible gift for storytelling which keeps the reader spellbound. And there is material enough here for 100 short stories: I loved the divertissement of the mad Baron who holds to hostage the staff of a Berlin hotel, and the oddly reassuring tale of the servant Elias who has started gathering high-mark notes together in the hope that they'll eventually be worth something again but ends up collecting them for their own sake, since money has lost all its value. Anyway, these books are not only astonishingly faithful testimonies to the times in which they were written, but masterpieces in their own right, no doubt at all about that. On now to Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker.

The year of reading Ulysses

I must have cast my eyes over those opening words at least a dozen times (opening of the 'Telemachus' chapter as illustrated by Robert Berry courtesy of the excellent ulyssesseen website. Or rather, courtesy assumed, as they adopted one of my pix in their blog section, so I'm assuming mutual fair use). But only this year did I get to the end with, if not exactly full understanding, an awed appreciation of what Joyce was trying to do, the breadth and humour of his references, the ephiphanic attitude to the everyday.

Much of what I felt was neatly summed up in Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Faber), which adopts the Bryan Magee approach of explaining the complicated in simple, direct language. Kibberd's basic premise is that Ulysses follows the great traditions of the Odyssey, the New Testament, Dante's Divine Comedy and Hamlet, as 'wisdom literature' - the wisdom reposing mostly in the everyday living of Leopold Bloom rather than the thickety consciousness of Stephen Dedalus. Of course it doesn't make us feel better to know that the third episode, getting inside young Stephen's head, is precisely the one at which most readers give up because it's so knotty, and is supposed to be.


Kiberd sometimes seems to lose his way, and his style: why does 'Singing', on the Sirens instalment, read so badly? But I like his opposition to the navel-gazing academic approach, which is why I gave up fairly soon on Richard Ellman's Ulysses on the Liffey.

Anyway, life's too short to read piles of secondary literature. And I don't think I've ever had a more rewarding year in terms of discoveries. It began with Hilary Mantel - J's reading Wolf Hall was the lynchpin, but I started with Beyond Black in January and only worked my way through to the historical novels much later. Very much on a par with them is the Norfolk/Africa family saga A Change of Climate. I've only got Eight Months on Ghazzah Street still to go, but I've been steeling myself to feeling robust when I read it.

Which is a bit rich bearing in mind that I've been steeped in misery lit for the past six weeks. Yet never was there a better saying than the epigraph to Dostoyevsky's From the House of the Dead, 'in every human being a spark of God'. Clearly not every, as Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin so hideously demonstrated*. But it only needs some to make it worth going on living.


No-one puts that better than the steely-brilliant Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She's been holding to account the testimony of a German army physician on the killing of Jews in Sevastopol. He points out that totalitarianism's skill in 'disappearing' people makes a visible protest useless. She counters:

It is true that totalitarian domination tried to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear, but just as the Nazis' feverish attempt, from June, 1942, on, to erase all traces of massacres - through cremation, through burning in open pits, through the use of explosives and flame-throwers and bone-crushing machinery - were doomed to failure, so all efforts to let their opponents 'disappear in silent anonymity' were in vain. The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion posssible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story. Hence, nothing can ever be 'practically useless', at least, not in the long run. It would be of great practical usefulness for Germany today [Arendt's account was first published in 1963], not merely for her prestige abroad but for her sadly confused inner condition, if there were more such stories to be told. For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that 'it could happen' in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

I ought to quit while Arendt is so splendidly ahead, but I haven't finished with the peak of the year's reading. Margaret Atwood constantly points out in her futuristic nightmares the lesson that 'some people will not', but what makes Oryx and Crake a great book are the flights of stylistic fantasy, especially in the warped games played by the dystopic adolescents. Who else writes like this? Mantel, Martin Amis - name me others, please, whose manner doesn't seem flat after reading these supreme manipulators of the English language, and I'll be happy to read them. But if high stylishness isn't your metier as a novelist, then simplicity is always best. Which is why Tove Jansson's books for adults seem to translate so well, and why of all this year's novels, The Summer Book remains for me absolutely of the essence.



I'm now a third of the way through another Fallada masterpiece, Wolf among Wolves, a panorama of German life in the big inflation of 1923, and I'm looking forward to more thrillers and detective stories from Robert Littell and Ian Rankin, but I know it's La Jansson to whom I'll return for rooting.

*BTW, if anyone's still interested in the upshot of that A&E story, I went back to the Harrow hospital for the verdict on whether I needed an op or not and - the nice but clearly embarrassed specialist told me the CT scan hadn't been sent to him as promised, nor could it be obtained over the net on the spot. A waste of both our times. But he thinks a) it's pretty sure the damage is merely cosmetic and b) they need to do a much more detailed CT scan to make sure. And so it rolls on in to late January.

Good company down the A&E

Well, I'm not sure Hans Fallada, born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, makes exactly congenial reading when you're waiting for three hours to be seen in the mayhem of an accident and emergency department, but anything is bearable so long as there's humanity at the heart of it. Of which more anon. I should explain that it was the long-term accident rather than another immediate emergency which caused a concerned doctor to send me to Charing Cross Hospital nine days after the all-too-perfunctory inspection at St Thomas's. Last week's bash was still giving me gyp, and she discovered a dent above the eye which in my squeamishness I hadn't felt.


X-rays and further checking finally revealed, after three and a half hours' hanging around, that I have a left supraorbital fracture which, horror, may mean maxillary surgery. But in the meantime they're more concerned about the orb itself, so off I go first thing tomorrow to the Western Eye Hospital. The CX experience could have been a lot worse, despite a fair bit of wailing and crying from a failed suicide behind drawn curtains. Chief entertainment was an old parlare-ist called Reg, who'd been there all day for brain scans and tests, and his merry men. I just assumed they were a bunch of old London pals, which they were - but with a bit of a difference.

The giveaway was when Reg gently broke into a rendition of 'I am what I am', and of course the parlare which cropped up when one of his chums spoke of his old mum's ailments. 'You need to keep up your fluid intake', quoth another a little bit later, to which came the quip 'as the Bishop of London said to the actress'. There was a bit of bickering between them, which prompted me to tell Reg how fortunate he was to have such loyal companions. He agreed, felt my dent and invited me to drop in some time on a kind of friends-only casbah off the Battersea Bridge Road. Which I am, of course, very curious to visit if I can, and if indeed it exists as Reg, for all his eloquence, wasn't quite all there.

In the meanwhile, jammed between two slumped young men, I moved deeper into the horrifying world of Fallada's Alone in Berlin, German title: Jeder stirbt fur sich allein (another curious admission, by the way, had to sit cross-legged on the floor, where he was soon engrossed in Gautier's My Fantoms [sic]).


Simply as a document from someone who lived through the terrors in question, as of course did Irene Nemirovsky in the unfinished Suite Francaise, Alone in Berlin would be remarkable: the insights into the police-state Berlin of the early 1940s are unflinching, the Third Reich 'vile beyond vile', as the author incontrovertibly states. But Fallada is both blackly comic about the twisted logic of the regime and shatteringly moving about the handful of folk who insist on keeping their integrity no matter how useless their active demonstration of it might prove. The counterpoint of characters is worthy of Tolstoy, even if I'm not always sure about the felicity of Michael Hofmann's translation. My own preference would have been for the splendid Anthea Bell, but still we must be grateful to Hofmann for bringing a masterpiece to the attention of the English-speaking world.

There's an extraordinary chapter in which the imprisoned protagonist shares a cell with a psychopath who pretends to be a dog so that he can be registered as insane. Intriguing parallels here with the wonderful Bulgakov novella turned into the opera I saw last night, A Dog's Heart. I thought the staging was ENO at its idiosyncratic best - read all about it on The Arts Desk. Meanwhile, here are some shots from the Apple Store pre-performance event in which I had the pleasure of partipating. What a weird idea, to set it in the middle of a vast open shop with crowds milling and buzzing all around. I couldn't hear a lot of the earlier slots backstage, as it were, until I went and stood by a loudspeaker. There were star turns from the dog's chief puppeteer, Mark Down of the Blind Summit Theatre company, seen here demonstrating bag-of-bones Sharik to the magisterial Christopher Cook:


and from the young countertenor covering Sharik's 'pleasant voice', Iestyn Morris, who, accompanied by Murray Hipkin, made the dog's dream-monologue sound like something by Cavalli. His teacher Andrew Watts did a clarion job, too, in the show proper. We'll be hearing a lot more from this second Iestyn (can you believe there's another to follow in the footsteps of the estimable Mr. Davies?) Here he is on the left, standing by the dog-table with Tim Armstrong-Tayor, the actor who so wittily told the story from plastic surgeon Professor Preobrazhensky's perspective.


And last but of course not least, the brothers Simon and Gerard McBurney with our mainstay.


Complicite's main man had to dash off, so he did his bit with Christopher first; and then at the end I joined Gerard to talk Dog's Heart. Inevitably I was a bit in awe since he'd been, as he put it, a 'fellow musketeer' of composer Raskatov in Moscow and had a much closer bee-line to the work in progress than I did. But I'm glad to have had my preliminary hunches confirmed by such an inspiration-packed work.

People who live in glass houses

'See what he is suggesting? The house will be sort of hung from the first storey, here. Do you see? Downwards into the garden. The bedrooms and bathrooms on the entrance floor and then the living room below. Huge windows. Plate glass. I mean, the fellow hasn't really bothered with walls. Just glass.' His tone is one of amazement and excitement, as though he has just been the witness of a natural phenomenon that you see only once in a lifetime.

Thus the proud commissioner of the Landauer House in Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, aka the Villa Tugendhat of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Brno, built in 1928-30 and surviving all the forced repossessions and governmental interventions to stay open, on select days, to select groups. We saw it a couple of years ago thanks to the enthusiasm of our Viennese architect friend Tommi and his partner Martha (subsequent travels around Moravia mixed Janacek territory with a trip to the big Bata complex at Zlin, though we didn't find the model houses Tommi was looking for). Everything is exactly as Mawer describes it, down to the use of rare tropical woods and the semi-translucent onyx wall which in the novel becomes the living room's last-minute, hugely expensive piece de resistance



and the big glass windows which can be raised in the summer.


How far the book follows the real history of the occupants I can't say, though it stays fairly close to what happened to the house itself, whose original Jewish owners Fritz and Greta Tugendhat left in 1938 and never returned. I gather their descendants have applied for restitution to the Czech government, on the grounds that the Brno authorities failed to carry out the necessary repairs (though this is a UNESCO world heritage site). It did seem in a rather parlous state when we visited. Here, too, in 1992 'Czechia', as the Austrians so much more effectively call the Czech republic, was officially severed from Slovakia by the countries' respective leaders.


Mawer's novel is an admirable piece of imaginative reconstruction, verging on a pastiche of the German/East European epic. The characters, who sometimes feel a little like programmed creatures predestined to bonk each other, don't have the richness of those in a book which is closer in time to the dreadful topsy-turviness of the Second World War, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (I'm halfway through, and I can hardly bear to put it down). Nor does The Glass Room boast the supreme style of the novel I read in between, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

I sometimes feel Mawer has co-opted too much cultural information, interesting as it is for readers to learn about the tragically short life of Martinu's mistress Vitezslava Kapralova, a talented composer in her own right (as a disc loaned to me by Charles Mackerras richly demonstrated). But the house is the thing, and in his unusual quest to make it the abiding principal character, Mawer has lucidly succeeded. There's a fascinating Radio Prague interview with the author here.