Cesare - Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is 85 years old and has been publishing novels for more fifty years.  So why am I only just hearing about him?  Why has he been so disgracefully underpublished in the UK?

Congrats to Oldcastle/No Exit for getting hold of Charyn's 2020 novel Cesare.  They have published and publicised it well.   Cesare is the teenaged naval cadet Erik Holdermann who rescues a man being attacked by hooligans - only to learn that the man is Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr.  Canaris is a man of honour who repays his obligations, and Erik becomes 'Cesare' to Canaris's Caligari (referencing the expressionist silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), assassinating his master's enemies.

Erik is Aryan but was brought up by prostitutes in the Berlin ghetto and educated at a Jewish school.   He is adopted by the wealthy Baron von Hecht and becomes besotted with the baron's half-Jewish daughter Lisalein.  By the time war breaks out Lisalein has married the Nazi Valentiner, formerly her father's accountant.  She and Erik smuggle Jews out of Berlin.   Ultimately, inevitably, the Gestapo catch up with them both.

They are reunited at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp 'paradise' which the Nazis created to mask the Holocaust.  Also here is Benhard Beck, the Jewish cabaret artist who was the orinal Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  He colludes with the commandant in maintaining the myth of the camp - until the Red Cross finally turn up to inspect it.

Cesare is an astonishing book.  It is violent, comic, and makes no bones about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  The fictional characters are as convincing as the 'real' people.  Erik, Lisalein and Beck are benificent monsters; Canaris, who was executed by the Nazis a month or so before their defeat, is a martyr.  I hope Cesare opens the floodgate for mass publication of Charyn's backlist.  Meanwhile I have tracked down an ominibus of his Isaac Sidel novels from the mid-Seventies.

Railsea - China Mieville

 In a post-apocalyptic world life revolves around the Railsea, a nexus of railway lines populated by mole-trains, navy trains, pirate trains and salvage trains.   Sham ap Soorap is an apprentice doctor's assistant aboard the mole-train Medes.   Giant feral animals burrow the wasteland between the rail lines of the Railsea and Captain Naphi of the Medes is obsessed with a giant mole, a Great Southern Moldywarpe known as Mocker-Jack, which she claims bit off her arm.   Mocker-Jack is Naphi's obsession; all captains have them, just as salvagers have their specialisms, the junk they know best.   Whenever a train docks, the cities buy their produce and sell them rumour.

Sham is not content with his life aboard the Medes.   He rather fancies himself as a salvager, but a chance find sends him to the Shroake siblings in Manihiki, and they, eventually, lead him on a quest for the legendary end of the line.

I love Mieville's writing style, a sort of techno-baroque.   He endows his characters with endless cheerful eccentricities.   Even the pirates here have their good sides.   He handles action like a master.   Railsea is a quest novel and a good one.   The world imagined here is convincing and the book rather peters out when the object is attained.   The object, of course, has to be obtained otherwise the whole narrative is pointless, and the good thing is that Mieville has the taste and discrimination to leave it there, without tying up every loose end as lesser authors might.

Alexander - Klaus Mann

 Alexander (1929) was Mann's sixth novel which, given he was born in 1906, is a measure of whar a prodigy he was.   On the one hand he didn't exactly have to fight for publishers' attention, being the son of Thomas and the nephew of Heinrich.   On the other, he didn't get on with his father, being gay, a heavy user of drugs, and somewhat on the socialisr side politically.

Only Mephisto (1936) really remains in the literary consciousness, mainly on account of the film.   If Alexander is typical of his other work then this neglect is downright scandalous.   Had I not already looked up his dates I would have thought Alexander the work of much older writer.   Hesse's Siddhartha sprang to mind; Hesse was forty-five when he wrote it.   Alexander has something of the same episodic nature.   The battles are background matters as Mann focuses on the Macedonian prodigy's sexual problems and his inability to establish and keep friendships as his empite grows.   Essentially Mann's Alexander is a superhero in search of a secret identity.   He browses the cultures of the vanquished but only to see if he can fit himself in there.   He takes on the exotic, the freakish.   In every sense he is trying to determine how far he can go.

I was captivated.   This is a beautiful book that should be much better known.   I really like the presentation of this Hesperus edition.   The translation by David Carter seems stylish and fine, but the punctuation is too often disastrous.   Proof-reading required.   On the plus side, the management of notes is spot-on.

The Women of Troy - Pat Barker

 I thought The Silence of the Girls was Barker's best work since the Regeneration Trilogy.  Good news - The Women of Troy maintains the standard.   This covers a period of the Trojan story I am more familiar with, having spent a lot of time and thought on Euripides' play of the same name.   Troy has fallen, its princes have been killed; the men have either been massacred or enslaved and sent back to Greece as farm labourers.   This, self-evidently, is about the surviving women who have been portioned out as prizes to the Greek leaders.

Briseis is Barker's principal character in both books.   She was claimed by both Agamemnon and Achilles and caused a feud between them.   Achilles won out and she is now pregnant with his child.   Achilles, of course, is dead.   On his deathbed he gave Briseis to his lieutenant Alcimus, who has given her the best status and security by marrying her.   Other women are not so fortunate.   Cassandra has been given to Agamemnon, Hecuba to Odysseus.   Andromache, widow of Hector, has been granted to Pyrrhus, the sixteen year-old son of Achilles, who hacked down Priam and murdered Andromache's son.   Brilliantly, Barker makes him, not Andromache, the other main character of her novel.   Pyrrhus is haunted by the memory of the father he never really knew.   He is as strong as his father but he has no wisdom, and knows it.   The Myrmidons adore him but Pyrrhus the boy-man only loves his horses, in particular Ebony, one half of his chariot team.

I devoured this book.   If anything I found it even more enjoyable than Silence of the Girls.   Next up, apparently, is The Voyage Home.   Definitely a must-read for me.