Reading group: Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut.

I suggested this novel which takes the form of the confession of Howard W Campbell Jr, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison after the Second World War. His war crime has been to have made broadcasts in Germany for the Nazi regime, whipping up vicious hatred towards Jews. In fact, however, Campbell was an American agent, and his broadcasts contained coded messages for the Americans. His problem now is that this was so secret that there is no one to come forward and vouch for him and save him. The US government 'neither confirms or denies I was an agent of theirs.' Resigned to his fate, he writes his memoir-confession. Here he describes how, as an entirely apolitical playwright of German-American origin living in Germany, whose plays are enthusiastically patronised by the Nazis, he is approached on a park bench and recruited by an agent, Frank Wirtanen (whom the American government now denies ever served in any of their branches). Witanen suggests that he uses his Nazi connections to gain a position of influence in the regime. What follows is a tale of double-dealings, in which Nazis can turn out to be undercover Jews, a wife can turn out to have been replaced by an imposter who can then turn out to be a Russian agent, and a post-war leader of a right-wing cult with rabid hatred for Jews, Catholics and Black people can blindly recruit members from those very groups, all prefaced by a section in which Campbell describes his Israeli prison guards, some of whom turn out to be ex-Nazis.

All of this is told in Vonnegut's own wry, wise voice, rendering the deadly tragedy via black comedy. Introducing the book, I said that I consider it brilliant. I love Vonnegut's voice and the book's concern with moral ambiguity and its message that fascism does not die, which makes it very relevant to today. Everyone agreed. Ann said she thought that the fact that the book is blackly comic - thus engaging the reader - made the book particularly powerful and its message all the more chilling, and again we all agreed.

There was quite a lot of discussion of Campbell's attitudes. I said I thought that the book was a condemnation of apoliticism and political unawareness, and a warning of their dangers. It is Campbell's apoliticism which allows him to be recruited in the way he is (and for which he was probably recruited):  he says he did it simply because he thought of himself as a 'ham', an actor. But there are terrible consequences: in bleakly comic and tragic scenes, Campbell discovers that people took up the racist suggestions in his broadcasts. Someone in the group noted the connection with Bolano's By Night in Chile, which we read recently, in which the protagonist  blinds himself to the political atrocities around him.

While much of the novel operates as dark comedy, there are moments of deadly serious authorial passion, such as this vivid depiction of the totalitarian mind:

...a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random... The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined... The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases ... The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information ...

 That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference towards slave women and love for a blue vase -

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -

A stunning book, we all agreed, and went on to discuss our own political situation, which only goes to prove its contemporary relevance.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

Doug suggested this lively and linguistically inventive novel set in late nineteenth-century Montana and featuring two reprobate but disarming protagonists who run off together, pursued by a hired gang: Irish poet Tom Rourke, doper and drunk with existential yearnings, and Polly Gillespie, hard-bitten ex-prostitute and newly arrived wife of a mining company captain. Told in Barry's signature insightful prose - lyrical yet earthy and often comic - it traces their progress through the Montana forests and the dead of winter on their stolen horse and with their ill-gotten money, and charts their love for each other.

Clare and others said that they found the opening a little difficult. The author brilliantly employs the technique of free indirect discourse, slipping fluidly between a narrative voice and perspective and those of a character, with often a mix of the two within a sentence. At the start the prose adopts the baroque poeticism of Tom as, not yet having met Polly, he wanders the 'stations of the cross' - ie the bars along the main street of the mining town of Butte - wondering depressively if he will end up 'old and mad and forgotten on the mountain': 'He was appalled at the charismatic light '; 'He walked as charity. He walked under Libra.' However, the moment Polly appears with her new husband in the photography studio where Tom works as an assistant, things take an earthier, more ironic turn. Clare picked out as an example this sentence describing Polly, chiefly from Tom's point of view, but with a sly authorial injection: 'Eyes of wren's egg blue and one inclined to say hello to the other but not unattractively'. Soon after, we are inside the cynical, demotic verbal world of Polly as we learn how, herself purporting to be something she wasn't, she has unwittingly married a self-flagellating religious fanatic. Ironically, indeed hilariously, it is a situation in which Tom has had a huge hand, since, as a literate man, he provides a service for other, illiterate immigrants, writing for them disingenuously romantic and courteous offers of marriage, with misrepresentative promises of a comfortable life. From this point on, we all agreed, the novel is a compelling read, and most of us read it in two sittings.

To begin with, we didn't really have a lot to say about it apart from the fact that we had liked it so much, how brilliant we thought the narrative voice, and how, in spite of Tom's criminality and Polly's hardness, Barry makes us understand and care for them, and want them to escape and succeed in the end. I said I wasn't too sure that the novel was about very much more than love - that existential connection which the pair have, and which for Tom is the only thing worth living for, and for which he would be happy to die. Doug said he did think that was exactly what it was about, and no one demurred.

Ann, however, had said very little up to this moment, and now she said that she was obviously going to be the dissenting voice about the book: she hadn't been taken by it at all. Very surprised, we asked her why. She said that perhaps it was because she read so many Westerns when she was a teenager, but she felt it was cliched - the whole scenario of outlaws with hearts of gold on the run and coming across various quirky others on their travels.

We thought about this. Clearly, the distinctive prose sets the novel apart from others, but it occurred to me also that Barry was consciously using a well-known template (in which, as Ann herself pointed out, there's always a hero, and always a happy ending) and subverting it. The real interest of this book, unlike that of the traditional Western, is psychological, concentrating on Tom's existential longings and fears and Polly's more realistic though no less moving grasp on the world, and the telepathic emotional connection between them. Clare added that, in contrast with the heroic mode of traditional Westerns, the novel exposes the hardship for immigrants in such late-nineteenth-century mining towns - the cultural barrenness, the sense of scraping a living, the drugs, and above all the violence. Someone noted that there is no sense in the novel of the presence of Native Americans, but we felt that that was probably historically correct - they would have been long driven from such places.

All in all, a novel the group generally very much enjoyed.  

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here