Towards the top of Hugo Hamilton’s ingenious and fascinating novel The Pages, a e book membership in Berlin devotes its consideration to Joseph Roth’s novel Revolt, first revealed in 1924, till the members develop into extra excited about discussing eating places. Out of the blue, a voice enters the narrative: “What is that this, a foodie membership?”
The voice belongs to a duplicate of the particular e book Revolt. Its particular person tone has been so nicely established by now that we’ve got been eager for it to intervene. Certainly, each time this e book, this character, in tones each self-deprecating and clever, lets us know what it sees and feels and remembers, it enhances our sense of its quirky and needed presence.
The e book as a personality has a lot in frequent with its writer Joseph Roth. It’s a born noticer, somebody who loves the wealthy oddness of the world and registers each the seen and the doable with verve and power.
The quantity in query was spared the fireplace in 1933, rescued by a professor, given to considered one of his college students who hid it after which handed it on to his son, who took it throughout the Atlantic, who gave it to his daughter, an artist, who has returned to Berlin. On the finish of the second chapter, it writes: “I’ve gathered the internal lives of my readers. Their ideas have been added in layers beneath the textual content, turning me right into a residing factor, with human schools. I’ve the power to recollect. I can inform when historical past is at risk of repeating itself.”
Within the foreground is the e book as sentient, self-conscious human being; within the background is the writer Joseph Roth and his spouse, Frieda, who’re, as Hitler involves energy, dealing with doom.
Frieda’s gradual descent into insanity is invoked right here with pathos and tenderness, as are Roth’s personal wanderings as a journalist and novelist, his concern for his spouse matched by his personal wants as a author. In addition to working towards the clock, Roth is ingesting himself to loss of life. He’ll die on the age of 44 in 1939; his spouse will likely be murdered by the Nazis a 12 months later.
The e book watches over its present proprietor, Lena Knecht, who has develop into interested in a map drawn by hand on a web page on the again. Hamilton’s personal novel makes Lena’s quest for data right into a form of fable or people story. Because of this the thought of story in The Pages is multi-layered and fabulously unstable.
Berlin is depicted as a metropolis haunted by its previous, but in addition the centre of what Hamilton calls “a fluid world”, inhabited by individuals “free to journey backwards and forwards between numerous locations of origin, some actual, some imagined”.
There’s a marvellous passage when the e book – Roth’s novel – lastly returns to the library in Germany the place it as soon as lived. The opposite books “all start cheering in a collective hum”. The issue for Hamilton is that we have to take this significantly and to understand what a terrific joke it’s. A number of sentences later he has the books wanting “to bop around the library in celebration”.
In between, he writes two dangerous sentences to explain the library: “This gathering of human perception. This sanctuary crammed with an infinite quantity of thought and segments of creativeness.” Alone, this may appear weighty and portentous. In the course of a paragraph that’s nearly jaunty in regards to the books having a form of teddy bears’ picnic, the sudden change of tone may be very finely judged, form of excellent.
The e book as narrator lives in the true world, conscious that its personal survival and that of its form can’t be taken without any consideration. Just like the hero of The Tin Drum or The Good Soldier Schweik, it’s a determine of advanced and unholy innocence making an attempt to make sense of an encroaching darkness. However the book-as-hero right here just isn’t merely a survivor however a prophet, somebody who has witnessed sufficient to have the ability to say: “The previous is now not secure… My time is coming again. Hearken to what the writer wrote to his good friend Stefan Zweig 100 years in the past – the barbarians have taken over. Don’t deceive your self. All hell is coming.”
Colm Tóibín’s new novel, The Magician, is revealed by Penguin on 7 September