I'd never heard of W F Hermans before I got the Pushkin newsletter. He was a leading postwar novelist in the Netherlands and won many prizes. Having now finished The Darkroom of Damocles (1958) I'm not at all surprised.
Henri Osewoudt is a strange young tobacconist in the small town of Voorschoten. He is in many ways androgynous - he doesn't need to shave and yet he is clearly not impotent. He has married his older cousin, who taught him everything he knows about sex. His father was murdered by his mother during a fit of insanity. The mother has since been released into Henri's rather lacklustre care.
In 1940, as Holland is falling to the Nazis, Henri bumps into a Dutch officer called Dorbeck who, bizarrely, looks a lot like Henri, except for the fact that he has dark hair and can grow a beard. Dorbeck asks Henri to develop a roll of photographic negatives for him, which Henri does (badly) and posts off to the address Dorbeck provided.
He hears nothing for four years. Then Dorbeck sends a message. He is now a leading member of the underground, working with London to get rid of the Nazis. He draws Henri into the circle and Henri very quickly finds himself assassinating traitors and collaborators. He finds a new Jewish girlfriend and thus has to rid himself of the old wife. He is captured by the Nazis, freed by the Resistance, disguises himself as a woman and, in that guise, crosses into the part of Holland already liberated by the Allies - and is promptly arrested as a collaborator.
The rest of the novel is about his yearlong quest, in custody, to prove his innocence. He needs the war hero Dorbeck to come forward but Dorbeck cannot be found. What has happened to him?
I must confess I was getting a little bored with the last bit - until the thunderbolt was very cleverly dropped. It really is a stunner - one I've used in my own short fiction but never saw coming here. Some critics have likened Hermans to Camus and Sartre, and I see where they are coming from. Highly recommended.
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