Mars in Aries - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 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.

The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard

 An odd little book, this.  It's a novella, only 128 pages in larger than usual typeface with blank pages between sections.  It certainly isn't non-fiction, yet there's no plot and barely any character development.  It has lofty literary aspirations - it won the 2017 Prix Goncourt - but for me at least the occasional literary flourishes were more off-putting than stimulating.

So what is The Order of the Day?  I suppose it's a pen-portrait of strategic moves made by various of the great powers in the build-up to World War II.  It is a collection of snapshots of those who one way or other appeased the clearly deranged Fuhrer of Germany.  The Munich appeasement by British PM Chamberlain is not one of those featured.  Instead we get a slightly earlier meeting with Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary.  Mainly it's about the Anschluss of Austria.  The sections dealing with this shameful episode are the best parts of the book, and I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the stage-managed 'welcome' - the Austrian girls all waiting expectantly while Hitler struggles to get past his own tanks, which have got stuck in mud.  There is a passage discussing how Joseph Goebbels altered the film record to make it look triumphant and how we have come to accept this version as truth even when the facts are readily available.  Framing this episode are before and after scenes showing how the great German industrialists agreed to bankroll Hitler, and how after the war they all got away with their use of slave labour.

What makes the book important is, firstly, the emotional impact Vuillard manages to get into passages like those dealing with the experience of slave labour - no more than a couple of paragraphs, yet they take your breath away.  Secondly, and I suspect this is what prompted Vuillard to write the book, the realisation that our world today is not very different.  Populist sociopaths in power around the world, tearing up consensus, human rights, human dignity, to enrich first themselves and then their capitalist backers, themselves too rich to ever be prosecuted.

In some senses The Order of the Day is an unsatisfactory read.  Overall, though, it's an essential one.