Hubert Mingarelli - The Invisible Land

Irmgard Keun - Ferdinand, The Man with the Kind Heart: A Novel

Guido Morselli - Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing

Peter Ackroyd - Mr Cadmus

The New Criterion, May 1 2021

Writing a few years after the armistice that, at 11 o’clock on November 11, 1918, brought a halt to the fighting on the Western Front, John Buchan related how:

At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African Brigade, which represented the easternmost point reached by the British armies, a German machine gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.

After that, peace descended on the long battlefield. A new era had come and the old world had passed away.

But cataclysms rarely end so elegantly. More of the old world lingers on into the new than is often presumed.

The Invisible Land, the final novel by the French author Hubert Mingarelli (he died in January 2020), first appeared in France (as La Terre Invisible) in 2019 and, translated into English by Sam Taylor, was published in the United Kingdom the following year. This strange, unsettling work, which is in some respect the third of a Mingarelli trilogy on war—each novel written with graceful precision, each understated, and each of which repays a close second reading—opens in July 1945. A photographer in the British Army is based in northwestern Germany. The Reich has fallen, but traces of the old “new order” still haunt not only what is meant to replace it, but the men who had torn it down.

The photographer (who is never named) had accompanied the troops that liberated a concentration camp, leaving him with memories that he cannot shake off. For reasons that he is unable to decipher he sets out with a driver on an expedition to photograph “the people of this damned country . . . . I want to photograph them in front of their homes.”

As in the earlier two novels, Four Soldiers (Quatre Soldats, 2003) and the profoundly disturbing A Meal in Winter (Un Repas en Hiver, 2012), the laconic loveliness of Mingarelli’s prose can have a distancing effect, so much so that he can at times seem to be describing a performance or even some kind of vision, the latter echoed in the title of The Invisible Land and embraced in its text:

A woman in soldier’s boots walked past, pushing a handcart with nothing on it. Her dress was an immaculate white. The wheel creaked. A star lit up the sky. In the distance the engine finally started. Two beers and everything was mysterious.

This passage comes very early in the book, signifying, perhaps, the beginning of a journey into fable, but not myth: reality, however lyrical its framing, keeps crashing in. The night that the soldiers entered the camp:

[S]omeone sent a flare up . . . and it fell back to earth lighting up the dead and the living in the same red glow and at that moment nobody thought that the man who’d fired the flare had lost his mind but that he’d sent it up deliberately like a red howl aimed at the sky and when it died out it left behind an even deeper silence.

It was Four Soldiers that led to comparisons between Mingarelli and Isaac Babel. Well, both that book and Babel’s short story collection Red Cavalry (1926) are set in the Russian Civil War, and comparisons have to start somewhere (it probably didn’t hurt that Mingarelli identified himself as a fan of Babel). But even when Babel was at his most poetic, the violence is always nearby:

Darkness thickened around us. The cavalry transport crawled heavily along the Brody high road. Simple stars rolled through Milky Ways in the sky, and distant villages burned in the cool depths of the night.

Mingarelli served for a while in the French navy—a time in which, as reflected in his novella Océan Pacifique (2006), he was present for some of France’s nuclear tests in the Pacific (I cannot help noting that he was only sixty-four when he died of cancer)—but he never saw combat, let alone atrocity. Babel witnessed both. There is nothing like the brutal and sometimes baroque accounts of savagery that run through Red Cavalry in Four Soldiers, much of which is devoted to a spiky idyll away from the front lines, a literal distancing to accompany the stylistic.

In A Meal in Winter, the distancing is moral too. The book opens in occupied Poland during the Second World War. Three German soldiers are allowed by their commander to venture out into the countryside:

We explained to him that we would rather do the hunting than the shootings. We told him we didn’t like the shootings: that doing it made us feel bad at the time and gave us bad dreams at night . . . .

Solitary trees stood in the fields. Haystacks too, round and covered with snow under the aluminum sky. We’d found some of them inside the haystacks during the spring. Not us in particular—Emmerich, Bauer and me—but we knew that some had been found. But there was no point digging in the snow today, in order to search for them. Who could hide in a haystack on a day as cold as this? And the cold had not begun yesterday.

Suddenly Bauer said, “What if we don’t find any?”

Any.

But they do.

In The Invisible Land, the colonel who led the liberation of the concentration camp tells the photographer, “We haven’t seen everything yet”:

“We’re starting to hear about it. Thousands of them, in ditches, machine-gunned. Ukraine is a graveyard. And who dug the ditches?”

He fell silent, and then whispered: “How fast did their hearts beat while they were digging?”

I could see his chest swell. His gaze passed over me, then gathering a little strength he said, as if to himself: “You want to photograph them and you don’t know why.”

And so, the photographer, driven by a soldier, O’Leary, troubled by demons of his own, sets off in a large car that may have belonged to a Nazi prosecutor who was about to be hanged. They sweep out of town—the stories in this “trilogy” typically unfold in rural settings, their beauty a reproach—on a mission the photographer never quite seems to understand. He photographs an old couple in front of their home, a young woman in front of hers, a group of seven in front of theirs, a gatekeeper in front of his. A grandfatherly type encamped in a barn bids them farewell with a military salute.

The days blur, food runs short. Occasionally there are stark reminders, even blunter than the hostile response at a wedding party on which they descend, both conquerors and Banquos by proxy, of what inhabits the landscape through which they are traveling—a uniformed body floating in a river, a column of prisoners:

What had sounded like a river in flood was in fact hundreds of tin plates and flasks knocking against each other and slicing through the burning air.

The Invisible Land’s conclusion is dominated by an act of violence that hints at the darkness in O’Leary’s past. But the photographer’s enigmatic, quietly accusatory project remains unexplained, with only, maybe, a recurring dream providing some clue as to what is driving him on:

I fell asleep and dreamed about the tarpaulins that we’d spread over the dead that night, and in my dream they lifted up and we thought it was the wind and even though we hammered stakes into the ground to hold them down they still kept lifting up. We held them down with our hands, using all our strength, but a greater force continued to lift them up and each of us knew deep down that it was the dead, pushing at the tarpaulins with their grey legs.

In a way, Irmgard Keun’s Ferdinand, the Man with a Kind Heart (Ferdinand, der Mann mit dem freundlichen Herzen) takes up the story—or, more accurately, avoids it—with a depiction of the new West Germany just as it was taking its first steps back to recovery. The currency reform that was to pave the way for the renaissance of that part of Germany not under Communist rule was beginning to yield results: “New houses and little shops” are “springing up among” the ruins. Now there are “vegetables in profusion.” People are finding work that goes beyond the makeshift. “Times,” says one woman, “are getting much more normal . . . . We spent so long walking around bareheaded, but Mama and I are getting three hats made, each. You can’t really walk around without a hat anymore . . .”

But, as Keun shows, life is still very hard, if softened at the edges by the unacknowledged fact that a fuller reckoning with recently concluded barbarity could, thanks to Nuremberg and other trials (as well as the intensifying Cold War), be deflected, something to which, tellingly, she doesn’t refer: a silence about a silence that, given her own history, sounds very loudly. Ferdinand was published in 1950. Seventy years later, the first English-edition language edition, translated by the ubiquitous Michael Hofmann, came out in December.

Keun initially rose to prominence with two best-sellers released in the Weimar twilight, Gilgi, One of Us (Gilgi—eine von uns, 1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen, 1932), both featuring heroines doing their best to make their own way in a country on the brink of disaster.

“I want,” says Doris, the artificial silk girl, “to have a pale pink tulle dress with silver lace and a ruby red rose pinned at my shoulder—I’m going to try to land a job as a model, I’m a gold star—and silver shoes . . . oh what a tango fairy tale . . . and what wonderful music there is—when you’re drunk, it’s like going down a slide.”

Late Weimar being late Weimar, the mania that is to metastasize into catastrophe is never too far away (“politics poisons human relationships. I spit on it.”). An industrialist who spots Jews everywhere asks whether she is Jewish too:

My God, I’m not—but I’m thinking: if that’s what he likes, I’ll do him the favor—and I say: “Of course” . . . . So he says he should have known with my curly hair. Of course it’s permed, and naturally straight like a match. So he gets all icy; turns out he’s a nationalist with a race, and race is an issue—and he got all hostile—it’s all very difficult.

The Nazis being the Nazis, they saw Keun’s novels as examples of rootless, urban “asphalt literature.” Once in power, they banned her books and prohibited the publication of any more of her writing. Keun being Keun, she sued (unsuccessfully) for lost revenues. She went into exile and was living in the Netherlands when it was overrun by Germany in 1940. Somehow she returned to her homeland (the circumstances are murky, but false papers and a press report that she had committed suicide probably played their part) and survived the war. Ferdinand was the first novel she wrote after the fall of the Reich—and the last. She struggled to reestablish herself, wrestled with alcoholism, and was institutionalized for some years. Rediscovered by readers in the late 1970s, she died in 1982.

Fragmented and sometimes rambling, Ferdinand lacks the drive and (often bleak) verve of both Gilgi and The ArtificialSilk Girl, although those omissions may be an appropriate reflection of a society that remains, in every sense, in pieces. Ferdinand is a fascinating glimpse into a moment in German history that is little known in the English-speaking world, but there is much more to it than that—above all, perhaps, the mordant humor of its eponymous hero, a “returnee” (he dislikes the term, yet another assault on his individuality) out of a POW camp, here describing his landlady and her best friend:

Prior to the currency reform, they were both engaged in diverse black-market schemes, which they pursued with the nervous tenacity that imparts the fiery gleam of sexual sunset to the financial machinations of aging ladies.

The restoration of normality has a long way to go: the room Ferdinand rents in a still-wrecked Cologne is a “passageway” with “the feeling of a stretch coffin” between the landlady’s bedroom and her “kitchen-living room.”

But Ferdinand’s biggest problem is neither landlady nor corridor, but Luise, the fiancée he acquired through a mix of inertia, politeness, and, newly enlisted in the Wehrmacht, fatalism: expecting to be killed soon, what did it matter?

But he lived on, and so did Luise:

There are three items that Luise managed to hang onto throughout the war: a stove, an electric iron, and me. All three of us are a little impaired, and not quite good as new. But Luise is hanging tenaciously, not to say grimly, onto all of us.

What he really wants, after the enforced companionship of the army and the pow camp, is some solitude. His odyssey will have a happier ending if his particular Penelope has no part to play in it. She is, he concedes, a “nice girl,” but he has come to find her presence “oppressive”: “I have . . . established that this feeling of oppression is not love, and is no prerequisite for marriage, not even an unhappy one.”

Too kindly to give her the heave-ho, he hopes “that Luise will eventually turn her back on me in disgust.”

As that shows little sign of happening, Ferdinand has been “deeply and futilely in search of a good solid husband for her.”

The recent past intrudes occasionally. Luise’s “amiable enough” father, Leo, a former party official, is celebrating his de-Nazification, now “re-classified as a fellow traveler.” The concept intrigues Ferdinand (“Can it satisfy . . . a proud German man to be a re-classified fellow traveler?”), even as he watches Leo clamber “back up to the temporarily vacant throne of the family dictator,” a choice of words that suggests that not as much has changed in this new Germany as so many to pretend to believe, as does the language that comes next: “everyone tried to be as satisfied and dissatisfied as they’d been previously, in the good old days.”

Beyond the indignities of defeat, the past is chewed over by some, it seems, as gossip:

Everyone is lively, the conversation is washing around me. They are talking about Hitler. Just now a load of German newspapers are carrying articles about him again. An acquaintance of Eva Braun writes. Hitler’s secretary writes, a mailman, a general, a movie actress write . . .

Other infinitely darker topics go unmentioned.

Ferdinand recalls his time in the army with distaste, but mainly for the way that he was “humiliated almost to the point of annihilation” by its machinery (“there is nothing so humiliating as obedience without willingness and without love”). We never really learn about where he was, nor what he did, in the war, but his lack of enthusiasm for that machinery clearly endured: “[W]hen people start to tell me that military discipline is necessary for the preservation of a state, then I tell them where they can put their state.” A derisive reference to the new government in Bonn and his refusal to vote hint at continuing discontent. We can only speculate as to whether it stems from the failure of Ferdinand—something of a drifter—to adjust to this nascent new normality or a deeper unhappiness, perhaps (“our new fairy-tale government princes”) at what is being left unsaid.

At one point in the course of an awkward visit to Luise, Ferdinand imagines

waking up one morning and being all alone in the world. . . . All I hear are the sounds of the air, and my own breathing. I wander through the empty streets and buildings . . .

In Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing (1977), by the Italian writer Guido Morselli, that is pretty much the situation in which the unnamed narrator endsup finding himself.3 Caustic, clever, no mere misanthrope (we’ll get to that), and sometimes drily funny, he has already been so repelled by the greed he sees all around him in Chrysopolis (from the Greek Χρυσόπολις, “golden city,” and, in Dissipatio, a sort of Zürich) that he now lives near a village in the mountains, but even that is not enough (“I confess my psychic life is poor”). He decides on suicide “because the negative outweighed the positive. On my scales. By seventy percent. Was that a banal motive? I’m not sure.”

He goes to a cave that contains a deep lake, the perfect place to make that final exit:

I would be gone, leaving no trace. That point seemed essential to me. People, if they did look into it, must come to the conclusion I was permanently missing. Or better, mysteriously annihilated, dissolved into nothing.

But he backs out, only to hit his head hard on a protruding rock as he is departing, something that leaves him stunned: “and just then a great peal of thunder shook the valley, which was as black as the cavern I was emerging from. It was the season’s first thunderstorm.”

Disoriented, he takes a circuitous route home, and once again contemplates ending it all:

[T]he ultimate solution, neat and clean and simple, was right at hand. I went to get her, my black-eyed girl, and lay back on the bed with her. I pressed my mouth to hers at length.

I invited her with my finger, once. But not vigorously enough. Then a second time, my mouth still pressed to hers. But a third time, no, because suddenly the shadows enveloped me. And stillness.

I had fallen asleep, a mortal sleep.

Over the next few days, he discovers that the village is deserted, and not just the village, but the village after that, and then Chrysopolis too. Nobody is at the airport, suggesting that “the Event” has occurred across the globe. He may have failed to dissolve into nothing, but humanity has pulled it off.

He begins to miss his fellow man. Much of the book consists of the narrator’s own musings—inevitable when no one else is around—some of which are philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical). Like most philosophy (or pseudo-philosophy), this tends to bore rather than enlighten. The last man is, however, also the last aphorist: “Anarchy and monarchy coexist, now and in me. No one possesses me; I possess all.” His ex-girlfriend was a “sentimental miseducation.” And this is refreshingly direct:

I am not some comic Alceste le Misanthrope. I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe, I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents. . . . But now that they are playing hard to get . . . I’m beginning to reevaluate their importance.

The book’s title alludes to Dissipatio Humani Generis, a text, we are told, written in the third or fourth century by the philosopher Iamblichus of Chalcis, in which that sage supposedly described the ultimate evaporation of humanity into a spray or a gas, which, when compared with other forms of apocalypse, was, in the narrator’s view, “maybe not glorious, but at least dignified.” I must admit that Iamblichus was a new name to me, but there appears to be no evidence that his Dissipatio ever existed (and it may not be the only such erudite invention within this novel).

Then again, we are in the hands of a narrator who is so unreliable that we cannot be entirely certain about the nature of his existence. Did he go through with his suicide after all? There are a few faint hints that this may be the tale of someone unaware that he has arrived in the hereafter. Either way, he looks to be doomed to spend his “strange eternity” alone, wondering “[w]here have they gone. Why have they gone.” He suspects that something supernatural has taken place—not an unreasonable assumption, to use a possibly doubly appropriate word. And when he discovers an absence that may provide the answer, it is terrifying. He is left in “a sort of horrid hypnosis. I, the witness.”

Despite some angry rhetoric, his regret at our species’ disappearance is real enough (“A shipwrecked human solidarity bobs up, a surprise last-ditch response”), but so is his celebration of the passing of a (to him) crassly materialist society and of the reemergence of the natural kingdom. Wildlife senses “the great enemy has withdrawn.” There are more birds about, a family of chamois goats comes down from the mountain, something he has never seen before:

The air is clear of smoke and fumes, the earth no longer stinks or quakes with terrible noises. (Humans, you want to fight pollution? Simple: eliminate the polluting breed.)

Such themes (and the related ideological baggage, some of it, particularly the animus that runs through his environmentalism, ahead of its time) were irritating, to me anyway (I am a collector of things, grateful for technological progress, uninterested in the spiritual, and wary of “mother” nature). But they are not enough to detract from the power of Morselli’s storytelling or the melancholy allure of the images that he conjures up:

The flags lined up on the terrace at the Kursaal stupidly salute only me. So too the geraniums spilling out of the boxes at City Hall and the streetlight winking at the corner of the market square. The lights and the chalky facades of the great hotels reflected on the wet asphalt shine for me alone.

I leave the car in the middle of the street; it won’t bother anyone. Once the engine is silenced, I am even more alone, I who detest that noise.

Dissipatio concludes with a few lines of remarkable beauty, but its tale doesn’t end there. The narrator is, as explained in a fine introduction (supplemented with useful endnotes) by the book’s translator, Frederika Randall, “a partial portrait—many-faceted and abstract” of the author himself. Morselli’s encounter with his black-eyed girl, a Browning 7.65, was more decisive, probably, than that of his protagonist. He shot himself in 1973, after Dissipatio, his seventh novel to be turned down, was rejected. None of Morselli’s fiction appeared in print during his lifetime, something that is the subject of an oblique, self-deprecating joke in Dissipatio. After Morselli’s death, one of his friends persuaded a Milanese publisher to take a look, and in 1974 Morselli was, too late, “discovered.” This edition of Dissipatio, which was released at the end of 2020, is the first to appear in English.

A key element in Mr Cadmus, the latest book by the English writer Peter Ackroyd, an accomplished biographer, historian, and, as here, novelist, is revenge, decades later, for a wartime horror. In addition, its earlier stages are marked by matricide, infanticide, the murder of a grandmother, the last a sad category of victim without the distinction of a “cide” of its own (none of these unfortunate incidents is the horror in question). Despite this, much of the book is a thoroughly enjoyable comedy of constipated manners and dubious deaths, set in Little Camborne, a Mayhem Parva in Devonshire in the early 1980s, without, alas, a Miss Marple to clean up the mess. Ackroyd’s spinsters are spun from a different cloth.

An undemanding stasis is shaken by the arrival of Mr. Cadmus, a foreigner—who behaves (kisses are blown) and looks like foreigners were, in a less cosmopolitan era, meant to look (green trousers, scarlet sweater, plaid scarf, cravat, yellow overcoat, “pencil-thin moustache,” “slightly swarthy”)—in his fifties who buys the middle cottage in a row of three. His new neighbors—on one side, Maud, on the other, Millicent—are unmarried women well into middle age: prim, snobbish, and united by more than their avian surnames, Finch and Swallow, respectively. Both have darker pasts than appearances would suggest.

On paying an initial courtesy call to Miss Swallow, box of chocolates in hand, Cadmus (“Theodore Cadmus. Theo”) offers up a speck of autobiography:

“I come from a small island in the Mediterranean. It will mean nothing to you.”

“I suppose not.

“We are small. We are under two hundred persons.”

“Rather like Little Camborne.”

“Oh no, dear lady. Here you have all the blessings of a lovely land. And your lovely hedges.”

“Hard to prune, I’m afraid.”

“And yet so beautiful, I could weep. Here. Look. There is a tear.”

Miss Swallow looked alarmed. She wondered if the wine had gone to his head.

The first third or so of the book is mainly a satire of provincial life in a time and a place in which an older England still endured. This is familiar enough (although I had not expected the fearlessly foulmouthed parrot), but, even when Mr Cadmus tips over too far into caricature, Ackroyd’s sly, deadpan wit renders the cliché—little Englanders and all that—forgivable.

Mayhem Parva is what it is: the post office is robbed, the vicar loots the church (“even the piggy-bank for the crisis in West Africa had been rifled”), and in due course the deaths begin to pile up.

But a significant part of the mystery is revealed halfway through the book, a misstep that will shock anyone drawn into Mr Cadmus by the thought of the clever Christie pastiche that it could have been (even if its shout-outs to detective fiction, both gratuitous, are, perversely, to Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey). Dame Agatha would not have slipped up like that. What is more, despite her own dips into the supernatural, she would probably have been unimpressed by the role it plays in this book. And rightly so. In his Hawksmoor (1985), Ackroyd deftly wove the otherworldly into the story. In Mr Cadmus, the supernatural not only adds more clutter to a plot that has quite a bit of it as it is, but also sets the narrative off in so many directions, some absurd, that many may find it a strain to keep up, and may well, by the end, be annoyed that they persevered.

That said, the earlier part of this book alone is worth the price of admission, and I had considered recommending abandoning Mr Cadmus just after that premature, if partial, revelation. But that would mean missing out on treats such as Ackroyd’s description of the meal that Maud, Millicent, and Theo share in London:

The brodo came almost at once in small blue soup-plates. It was of a pale and watery consistency, with pieces of fish floating within it. It might have tasted of celery. It might have tasted of carrot. It was hard to be sure. Maud looked at Millicent, but they said nothing. “Can you savour the scent of the sea?” Theo asked them. . . . “Ah, Italia! We are good fishermen, are we not?” Since the brodo offered no evidence either way, the women remained silent.

And the Limoncello has yet to arrive.