The Wall and after
Tom Hiney
DESTINY, OR THE ATTRACTION OF AFFINITIES by John David Morley Little, Brown, £16.99, pp. 298
Jens re-encountered the Romantic ideal of landscape with a sense of strangeness. It no longer seemed relevant. It had ceased to be a subject of art. He thought the disappearance of landscape from art was a loss that deeply mattered.
s the rather ominous title of the novel might suggest, the intellectual char- acters presented in Destiny, Or The Attrac- tion of Affinities are not ones for taking anything lightly. Every walk, view and prob- lem they come across tends to lend itself to metaphysical ponderings. Since the predominant backdrop to this stoirt is Germany's post-Holocaust guilt, there is no shortage of material for these characters to get through. Nevertheless, what starts out as an over-ambitious modern parable of fate, guilt and 'nationhood turns into a surprisingly convincing story.
The hero of this book is Jason Gould, a well-educated Englishman who moves to Berlin shortly before the overnight erection of the Wall there in 1961. One day he's swimming with his local girlfriend; the next day there is barbed wire between them. He and his German friends are stunned by the Wall, but soon accept it. Some of his friends feel that Germany deserves such turmoil after the evil of the Third Reich:
The Nazis stole. what innocence was left in the 20th century. They tore the veil that was drawn over the last taboos. No ambiguity remained, no hypocrisy in which to hide.
While those to the west of the Wall busy themselves with such angst, their less fortu- nate cousins on the eastern side of the city require no metaphors to feel the legacy of Hitler.
The author of this book lives in Munich, where he writes for both German and British publications. He has an exceptional- ly informed and fascinated neutrality towards both German history and the country's present psyche. There are times at which the lay reader will struggle with Morley's scholarly name-dropping, but the effort is worthwhile. He is an unashamedly intellectual novelist tackling a huge theme, but his writing has soul as well as brains
and it is this that makes his fiction engag- ing. The characters he presents begin (one cannot help feeling) as well-read puppets through which Morley can expound on 'The German Dilemma'. By the end of the story, they have become human and believ- able enough for the reader to care about them; and therefore think more about the issues which Morley continues to raise, through them.
There are other qualities that stop this book becoming too abstract. Morley is very good at describing specific glimpses of derelict East Germany. Run down railway stations, old collective farms and retired Stasi agents are described with an eye for detail that keeps this story rooted and vivid. These vignettes give a resolution in contrast to the underlying themes of the novel which, as with most intellectual themes, can never really be resolved at all. The deeper Morley and his characters pur- sue The German Dilemma, the more con- fused they become.
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