For the past two weeks, courtesy of Hans Fallada, I have been experiencing a nightmare. Fallada, the pen-name of Rudolf Ditzen, is the author of Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone*), a novel that first appeared in 1947. The proximity of publication to the end of the war is remarkable because it deals with the disintegration of morality and ethics under the Third Reich in a way that was not really attempted in German society until the ’68 generation began to ask their amnesiac parents and grandparents about what they did during the war. It’s arguable that Fallada’s unflinching act of witness remains nonpareil.

Although the novel is pitiless in exposing how values are inverted under a totalitarian system, it is even more concerned with illustrating how humane qualities can stubbornly endure in the face of the Nazis’ binary logic—either you’re one of us or you’re nothing. The backbone of the narrative is the “campaign” waged against the state by a middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel (Fallada’s drew on the Gestapo files on a real-life Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, for his story). The Quangels’ fateful shift from passivity to action is initiated when their son, nicknamed Ottochen, is killed during the German invasion of France. In the first shock of grief, Anna berates her husband over the death of her son in the “wretched war” started by “you and that Führer of yours.”

Stung by this careless accusation and determined to show his wife that he’s far from being Hitler’s accomplice, Otto Quangel decides to rebel. His tactic seems ostensibly pathetic: each Sunday he and Anna meticulously write out in block capitals on a postcard a resistance slogan (“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son,” reads the first); the next day the card is left in the hallway of an arbitrarily chosen building to be picked up by a random Berliner.

This central story—and the investigation undertaken by the Gestapo to catch the card writer—largely unfolds in a Berlin milieu that encompasses the erudite figure of a Judge Fromm (a widowed neighbour) through the besieged artisanal respectability of the Quangels themselves down to the demimonde of thieves, shirkers, and informers that are both victims and occasional instruments of the Nazi power. Fallada’s narrative style isn’t subtle—apparently written in a 24-day rush (which makes Stendhal’s legendary 52-day composition of The Charterhouse of Parma seem almost dilatory), the book is content to depict its principals in chiaroscuro rather than naturalistic shades of grey. For example, the family of SS fanatics who occupy a flat in the Quangels’ block, the Persickes (even their name has a certain oleaginous nastiness to it), are brutish, violent, and short tempered. Similarly, the forces of law and order, as represented by the twin aberrations of the Gestapo and the People’s Court, are populated by screaming archetypes of culpability rather than humans struggling to accommodate themselves to circumstances. (Then again, footage of Roland Freisler, the model for the judge in the novel, confirms that Fallada was not exaggerating the hysterical viciousness with which defendants were treated.)

Perhaps the sole example for which the reader is encouraged to mingle contempt with sympathy is the figure of Inspector Escherich, the Gestapo officer charged with tracking down the “hobgoblin” responsible for dropping treasonous postcards across the city. Disdaining the brutal methods advocated and practiced by his superiors, Escherich believes cool ratiocination and patience will eventually snare his prey. Unfortunately for Escherich he does not work for an organization that values rationality and waiting for results—his delay in catching the postcard writer, along with some supercilious remarks addressed to a superior, results in a beating from his SS “colleagues” and incarceration in the cells into which he formally unthinkingly flung suspects. The shock of arbitrary imprisonment, compounded by guilt over a murder carried out to buy time for his investigation, causes Escherich to suffer a breakdown. It is triggered by a black epiphany:

Escherich once felt very secure. He once thought nothing could happen to him. He worked on the assumption that he was completely different from everyone else. And Escherich has had to give up these little self-deceptions. It happened basically in the few seconds after SS man Dobat smashed him in the face and he became acquainted with fear. In the space of a very few days, Escherich became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting it for as long as he lives. He knows it doesn’t matter how he looks, what he does, what honours and praise he receives—he knows he is nothing.

The unpolished facets of Fallada’s novel do not distract from its power. Indeed, the occasional awkwardness of its approach mirrors the obdurate integrity of Otto and Anna Quangel. The novelist’s straightforward dramatization of good confronting evil is reinforced by the Quangels’ uncompromising interpretation of their situation: Standing trial in the People’s Court, Otto underlines the system’s complete degeneracy by observing that the accused is the only innocent man in the room.

Above all, the book’s evocation of the nauseating fear that hangs over its characters drives home the truth embedded in the etymology of the term “totalitarian”: the regime demands total obedience, seeking access to every crevice of its subjects’ existences. After the Nazis corrupted German society through a rolling process known as Gleichschaltung, autonomous private life—on terms outside those defined by Party’s—became not so much prohibited as inconceivable. This is why the Quangels’ postcard campaign, superficially so ineffectual, infuriates the powers-that-be to the extent of punishing their own for failing to halt it. First, the postcards’ existence presupposes that there are one or more individuals in the Reich who are thinking along lines different from the Party’s. Second, there is the fear that the people who come across the postcards will be lured into “thought crime,” even if they go to the authorities immediately. This is because finders could realize the extent of their private misgivings about the regime by having them startlingly echoed and amplified by a public statement. The solipsism of the inner exile—the mind behind the chanting face—may be breached by nothing grander than a postcard.

Every Man Dies Alone reaches out beyond its specific historical context to raise always-germane questions about the relationship between oppression and choice. When Jean-Paul Sartre made the wilfully provocative observation that the French had never been freer than under the German Occupation, he was suggesting that people recognize their commitment to a principle only when they are taking grave risks for it. Today it’s easy in France or Germany to manifest one’s devotion to freedom and democracy. Less so in, say, Iran—however, for that very reason it’s arguable that democracy is most alive in Tehran at present because that is where one is sure of finding people who, in the spirit of Otto Quangel, are willing to pay the price for remaining decent.

*The title that Penguin UK chose for the novel, Alone in Berlin, tests to breaking point the latitude given to translators in devising translations that reflect the spirit if not the literal meaning of original texts. Perhaps I was already influenced by some of the quibbles raised in the Complete Review’s piece, but I did find the contemporary (i.e. 21st-century) usages in the English translation sometimes jarred with the era described. Aside from the expletives, which would have unlikely to have been as coarse in a late 1940s novel, I was stopped cold by the term “tracksuit bottoms,” which, for me, conjures up teenagers mooching in a shopping centre atrium rather than hard-pressed Berliners in the 1940s.

We have enough problems with linear narrative and true memory–from Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book

It is grimly apropos that I finally got around to reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture while the nation bobbed about in toxic wake left by the publication of Ryan/Laffoy Report. The Ryan Commission provided the most comprehensive factual account so far of how the institutions of Church and State worked hand-in-glove to facilitate the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of the Irish state’s “untermenschen.” And Barry’s novel undertakes the imaginative project of illustrating how forces of oppression could be applied in a particular setting, to particular people.

For much of her 100-year tenure on the planet, Roseanne McNulty née Clear, has been the object of these forces. Attempting at last to become the subject of her story, the ancient patient of the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital begins writing “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself,” in which she undertakes to clarify the course of events that led to her committal. Superficially belonging to that populous fictional cohort of “unreliable narrators,” Roseanne is not so much a duplicitous chronicler as one who is reluctant to face the enormity of the injustice that has been inflicted upon her. Passages in Barry’s novel unexpectedly recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful 2005 work, Never Let Me Go. The narrator in Ishiguro’s book adopts a cunctatory approach to her tale—by dallying fetishistically over humdrum details of boarding-school life, she allows her ultimate revelation to loom larger and larger in the background. Similarly, there is a sense that Roseanne’s reminiscences of her time working in the local cafe, her cinema trips to see Fred Astaire, and, most touchingly of all, the scattered childhood moments spent with her father, are all vain efforts to damn the floodtide of misfortune that have swept her old life away. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as Eliot would have it.

Interleaved among Roseanne’s account is the Commonplace Book kept by her medical supervisor, the institution’s senior psychiatrist, Dr William Grene. Grene is also using his journal as a refuge and as a tool—to come to terms with his failures as a carer and a husband.

It could be argued that it requires a willed credulousness to accept that both documents, putatively intended for the writers’ eyes only, are crafted with a shared level of novelistic precision. But the acceptance of implausibly articulate storytellers is typically part of the reader’s side of the contract with the writer. The compensation for accepting that deal is a remarkable prose style, which employs a conversational, storyteller’s tone to smuggle a heightened language into the reader’s consciousness. The following passage, from Dr Grene’s journal, illustrates for me how this rich text narrowly avoids becoming clotted by the density of allusions it contains (note how often the word “like” modestly slips in yet another simile into the cascade of comparisons).

[Grene has entered his dead wife's bedroom, and has begun reading from her extensive library on rose cultivation.] I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers’ bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bring a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

I picked up Tana French’s praised In the Woods because I was interested in whether it’s possible to produce a crime novel set in contemporary Ireland that doesn’t make your toes curl in embarrassment. Of course there’s plenty of potential material out there—we have more than our share of misdeeds—it’s just that fictional depictions of the interactions between Irish police and criminals are typically pallid photocopies of either US or UK models. French sidesteps this pitfall by having her work explore the psychological turmoil stirred up by a child murder. The body of a young girl is found on the site of an archaeological dig taking place on the exurban outskirts of Dublin; the discovery sets in train an investigation that, according to the back cover blurb, “takes the reader on an irresistible journey through a tangled web of evil and beyond—to the inexplicable.” I can’t fully vouch for the veracity of this breathless promise—I’m still only on around page 150 of a nearly 500 page book.

In the Woods, by Tana French. Published by Hodder Headline Ireland.

In terms of style, however, it’s already clear that the writing is a cut above the bullet-point prose of, say, a James Patterson policier. Unfortunately, while clearing that low hurdle, it often fails to reach the heights I had been led to expect from some of the plaudits I had read. It seems as though French, appraised of the genre’s clichés, swerves away from them only to end up in new cul de sacs. So, avoiding the hackneyed image of a grizzled, maverick ‘tec, French gives us as our narrator Rob Ryan—a new breed of more cultivated investigator. But the erudite copper (with a shadowy past nonetheless) already feels like an established archetype. And Ryan’s above-average education means that hard-boiled one-liners are replaced by observations that can sound laboured in their efforts to put a new spin on old subjects:

 For example, 

Few people would have considered her beautiful, but my tastes have always leaned towards bespoke rather than brand-name….

Or

Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

And

My time in training and in uniform [...] all felt like an embarrassing daze scripted by Ionesco…

The last quote forces you to consider the plausibility of an Irish police officer comparing his professional life to a script by a European absurdist playwright. Yet at least the above examples are lucid; I’ve read the following section repeatedly and I still can’t fathom what the word soupçon (meaning suspicion or a trace of something) is doing there:

We give taxpayers their money’s worth of comforting cliché. We mostly shop at Brown Thomas, during the sales, and occasionally come into work wearing embarrassingly identical soupçons. 

In sum, the uneven quality of the text reminds me why I usually avoid genre fiction in favour of the far smaller ghetto of literary fiction. There the storylines may be unoriginal, and the suspense tepid, but—for me at least—a book has to offer something over and above plot to keep you turning the pages.

The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk—thus pronounced the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Joni Mitchell expressed a similar thought more accessibly in “Big Yellow Taxi” when she sang “You don’t know what you’ve got/ ‘Til it’s gone.” And so, with Paul Krugman delivering obsequies for the Celtic Tiger, a novel arrives with ambitions to encapsulate the heady period when Ireland became (apparently, briefly) rich.

Bad Day in Blackrock, by Kevin Power. Published by Lilliput Press.

Hewing very closely to the facts about the death of a young man outside a Dublin nightclub in 2000, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock aims not only to present a portrait of a privileged group enmeshed in a killing but to serve a book of evidence that will indict society as a whole.

If this seems like a critic unfairly ascribing overreach to an author, it is not as if this well-written novel lacks state-of-the-nation ambitions. Power has his choric narrator try to explain the symbolism of the death of Conor Harris:

We do know it will end, of course, our golden age, our belle époque. At the edge of everything we do is the knowledge that this cocooned and happy little world, with all its desires and certainties, all its serene ambition, can’t possibly last forever, that it will one day become something different, something that we’ll find, waking one day in prosperous middle-age, subtly unrecognizable. There are people, I know, who are waiting for the end, who are ready with their elegies and their funeral rites. But they’re already too late. This world—rich south Dublin at the turn of the twenty-first century—is already over. It ended on the night of 31 August 2004. Even I see this only intermittently. But it’s the truth.

A whole world died with Conor. We just haven’t realized it yet.

The “whole world” Power creates through a sequence of short chapters is suffused with a blank consumerism familiar from Brett Easton Ellis novels—conjuring up an affluent Californian suburb incongruously perched on the edge of the Irish Sea. The father of one of the characters even builds a heated outdoor swimming pool, although Power is knowing enough to find the bathos in pursuing a West Coast lifestyle in a frigid climate: after several mornings Peter Culhane’s poolside breakfasts come to a halt due to the cold.

The college-age protagonists in the drama are drawn from a tight-knit Dublin community of private schools where rugby and eating disorders seem to be the primary passions. In sketching those implicated, the book makes diffident attempts to explore a possible rationale for the killing: beautiful Laura Haines briefly dated Conor Harris before moving on to the more prestigious Richard Culhane, rugby star and chief suspect in the death of Harris. However, the motive of drink-fuelled jealousy is only toyed with before being disregarded as too crude a template to be imposed on a chaotic reality. Ultimately, the killing, like most that occur on Irish streets late at night, is meaningless.

The apparent lack of volition is corroborated by the anthropological approach taken by Power. He takes pains to depict his players as products stamped out by their milieu—their schools and colleges, their comfortable homes, their pubs, shops, and churches. (A minor point: the Dundrum Town Centre—the group’s cultural Mecca—didn’t open until after the novel’s timeline.) The characters’ restricted intellectual horizons are more than fully exposed through their banal utterances—the girls witter on about Deb balls and weight problems whereas the boys banter aggressively about rugby and sex. The speech patterns ring true, but if their speakers embody a doomed world, it is hard to work up the empathy to mourn its passing.

In addition to interchangeable avatars rather than characters, the reader is also repeatedly challenged by the propinquity of real events and their fictional homologues. (Anyone who lived in Ireland during the first few years of this decade will recall details—coverage of the high-profile trial was lamentably inescapable.) At times, it is difficult to wedge a playing card between the two. Of course, tackling a story that continues, one must assume, to cause great pain for all the (real) people affected poses irresolvable ethical issues for an artist. More significant perhaps, Bad Day in Blackrock’s fidelity to newspaper sources also raises aesthetic ones. Often during this book the novelist seems not to be drawing his characters and surroundings freehand, but judiciously tracing them, guided by outlines dimly visible beneath.