Liars living in denial

I'm sure there are readers out there to whom this sort of book would appeal. This reader wasn't one of them.

The unrelenting dourness of the main characters' lives is supplemented by their tendency to tell each other lies in relation to very important things - and twice the author pre-empts the truth of a situation by letting her characters tell lies to us, the readers. These people choose to live with what might have been rather than getting on with what is, and consequently create their own misery, again and again.

And there's a considerable element of callousness. One example is where significant "props" that appear early in the story, and reappear at intervals throughout, are abused. In one case a child is given one of these items, and dumps it in the mud as soon as the giver has gone.

In the second a teenage boy rifles through a purse full of items of considerable significance to one of the older characters, then tosses it casually out the window of a train. A third important prop is a rifle, which makes almost as many appearances as some of the minor characters. As the playwright Ibsen noted, if you're going to have a gun on the mantelpiece make sure you use it in the third act. Well, the gun is used all right, but in such an offhand way that all the build-up seems like an anticlimax. Perhaps this is meant to be irony. I found it annoying.

The story begins and ends in 1947 - the only sequences in which the German boy of the title appears to any degree - and then moves back to 1927 in order to work through all the shifting relationships, during the next 20 years, between two English sisters and their Jewish friends, a brother and sister.

The brother is an artist, and the sort of irritating character who never seems to be able to make a sensible decision.

The other (English) male characters in the story are mostly a reasonable bunch; it's the women who stand out as conniving and difficult. And they seldom seem to have a really good reason for being so.

The story shifts back and forth between London, rural Kent and Germany, and Wastvedt is adept at drawing these places and their people.

She's a strong and stylish writer, but her mode of operation - in this book anyway - is pessimism. Nobody is going to get to the last pages without being made thoroughly miserable, usually by someone very close to them.

I could have done with the occasional moment of joy.

 - Mike Crowl is a Dunedin writer.