When I saw that Penguin had added this to their Modern Classics line late last year I simply had to have it. It was Penguin that first caught my attention about Lernet-Holenia with Baron Blagge and Count Luna, and I eventually discovered I Was Jack Mortimer from Pushkin Press, All are enthusiastically reviewed on this blog. About halfway through Mars in Aries I began to wonder, Is it as good? It's certainly a more difficult read. Then I realised: That's because it is high level art.
Wallmoden (he is specifically not our hero) is a Viennese nobleman who served in the First War and is now in the reserve. As such he is called up for a month to take part in a field training exercise. Unfortunately that month turns out to be September 1939 and Wallmoden finds himself in the front line of the Nazi invasion of Poland.
This in itself doesn't bother him. What does is that he keeps him from the beautful and mysterious Baroness Pistohlkors whom he met just days ago in Vienna. I haven't found any info on the author's private life but otherwise this is exacrly what happened to him in 1939.
Wallmoden has been living a half-life, as has much of Europe during the Thirties, a state of semi-suspended animation whilst awaiting the inevitable next war. Wallmoden, like Lernet-Holenia, is turning forty. The baroness - 'Cuna' - is all he thinks about. But, not only does she keep disappearing on him, so do the people who she claims to know. Others claim never to have heard of her. Wallmoden enters action is a fugue state, participating without any sense of purpose. He is wounded in the hand, then blown up - and for a time he cannot distinguish between reality and dream. One of those dreams involves two young women and a bathtub. Stranded in the middle of Poland, with no idea where he is supposed to go, Wallmoden blunders into a repetition of that dream. Is it real? Who is the naked girl?
The ending of Mars in Aries is utterly breathtaking. Any faults earlier (if indeed they are faults in hindsight) are blown away. Perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that Lernet-Holenia wrote it in two months - while on active duty in Poland.
