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.

Contango is

A) the pidgin form of English spoken by stevedores working in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt

B) the period during which young men in certain sub-Saharan tribes undergo rites of passage

C) the situation in which the current or spot price for a commodity is lower than its forward price

D) the maximum number of shipping containers a cargo ship can carry

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option C. Contango is often used in reference to oil markets because petroleum is a non-perishable good that can be stored indefinitely while owners wait for future contracts to mature. Contango is the reason why, for example, eight supertankers—each of which can transport up to two million barrels of crude oil—remain anchored less than a hour’s travel from the Dutch port of Rotterdam. These huge vessels are serving as floating storage as the facilities in Rotterdam are already at capacity. The information is taken from a report in NRC Handelsblad, “The world is swimming in oil,” which attempts to clarify the economics underpinning this stalled armada:
“It is what we call a contango,” says Pieter Kulsen, who has been working in the oil trade for thirty years. Traders buy cheap oil on the spot market and later sell it for much more on the futures market. The price difference is more than enough to pay for the cost of floating storage, especially since the tariffs on land are higher because of the capacity problems. Lots of people are taking advantage of this situation.

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.

In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a member of his suburban coven, Sukie Rougemont, has produced a gossip piece for the local rag. The reaction from her friends is less than rapturous:

“Well, honey, it had color, but you do run on a bit and honestly—now don’t be offended—you must watch your participles. They dangle all over the place.”

Indeed, Sukie’s infelicitous prose (did Updike wince slightly while sabotaging his usual flawless style?) does showcase a classic example of a dangling participle inadvertently conveying a ridiculous image:

Constructed circa 1895 in a brick English style, with a symmetrical façade and massive chimneys at either end, the new proprietor hopes to convert his acquisition to multiple usages…

Of course, the new proprietor was not constructed in a brick English style. A sentence such this falls in line with the comical botches usage guides have typically trotted out to buttress their arguments. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage goes as far to speculate that “funny examples have apparently been invented for the purpose of illustration. Actual dangling modifiers are more often of such a nature as to excite little mirth; indeed, they may hardly be noticeable except to practising rhetorician or usage expert.”

Case in point is a line from a recent Economist article on Ireland’s upcoming poll on the Lisbon referendum: “What of the second referendum on Lisbon this autumn? Looking at the polls, a Yes vote is widely expected.”

Reading this sentence according to the “rules,” we could quibble that a Yes vote would be unlikely to look at a poll. But that underrated tool for interpreting text—a degree of sanity—allows us to overlook the supposedly inappropriate modifier. If the result does not, for example, imply that a man was built from brick in the late 19th-century, it seems that a dangler can be easily swallowed, even by readers who can recognize one. Despite this commonsense approach, some of us still chaperone our participles with paranoid vigilance: we either struggle to parachute in phantom subjects (“Looking at the polls, most observers expect a Yes vote”) or groan in shame when discovering outbreaks in our own writing.

Nonchalantly expecting the pat on the head previous efforts had garnered, I was aghast at the blizzard of red ink annotating my text, which was instantly transformed in my eyes into a barbaric scrawl that must have elicited pained groans from its underpaid marker. Among the critical remarks that seemed to eclipse in word count the contents they were supposed to explicate was a cryptic abbreviation attached to an arrow spearing a hapless phrase: “sp. inf.!”

It says something about the calibre of my school education that it took a while (this was pre-Google) for me to learn that this was short for “split infinitive.” It then took even longer for me to find out what a split infinitive is.

I subsequently discovered that in my ignorance I was more in tune with modern usage than the schoolmarmish academic who had inadvertently demonstrated the gap in expectations between school and academic work.

In essence, contemporary pundits argue that to avoid a split infinitive is to crimp your style in obedience to a rule that cannot be broken in the language you are supposed to be emulating. In Latin, as in Romance languages, the infinitive form of a verb is a single word: for example, ire, “to go” (French: aller). In English, as just shown, the form comprises two words because the verb is prefaced by the particle “to.” Apparently, in the 19th century some usage panjandrums argued that muscling in a third word between the two—an “adverbial modifier” as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes it—threatened to break the holy bond between “to” and its verb.

The aforementioned Merriam-Webster volume gives its view:

To repeat, the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis. The original cause for complaint was probably awareness of a relatively sudden marked increase in use of the construction, perhaps combined with the knowledge that in those more elegant languages, Latin and Greek, the infinitive is never split—because it is a single word distinguished by its ending rather than by an introductory particle.

But if your initial awareness of a term coincides with your being taken to task for its misuse (even if the correction itself is semi-erroneous), can you ever return to that prelapsarian state of blithely dropping in adverbial modifiers?  Even now, there is a reflexive wariness that steers me “to write cautiously” rather than “to cautiously write.”

But if a correction from long ago can continue to influence your writing style, what effect can mockery have? I’ll take that up in the next post when I address a usage issue where the battle between fundamentalists and modernisers is still being waged.

Antitragus refers to 

A) a fourth-century heresy that was condemned at the Council of Nicaea

B) a part of the anatomy of the ear

C) an aesthetic movement in Ancient Rome that criticised the staging of Greek tragedies

D) the name of the drug administered in a tetanus shot.

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option B.  As you might guess, the nub of cartilage above the earlobe called the antitragus is located opposite the tragus. (That pinch of a gap between them—the straits through which sound enters the conchea—is evocatively named the “intertragic notch.” The tragus, the knobbly protuberance that helps keep earphones in place, derives its name from the Greek tragos, “goat.” The fine hair fringing the tragus supposedly resembles a goat’s beard. (This reproduction from Gray’s Anatomy will instantly clarify any obscurities that my explanation might have thrown up.)

Galchen deploys the word while describing a less-than-attractive reader sitting opposite her troubled narrator (antitragus to his tragus, if you like) in the New York Public Library:

“The mustachioed man’s hand was again behind his ear. His earlobe was large and pale, but the antitragus was bright red.”

This glancing observation presumably serves two purposes. First, it’s evidence that this writer’s eye can discern the microscopic details that, at a distance, blend to form what passes for “reality.” And second, it might be said to demonstrate that the author’s expensive medical education (the paperback’s inside page tells us Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine) has not been entirely squandered by the switch to literature.

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.

Trying to fill in the gaps left by the film, Moira checked Wikipedia. As well as getting some background about the group—more “correctly” known as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)—she also discovered the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” which was new to both of us. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialised version of the effect of serendipity.

The “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” was coined by a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Terry Mullen. The Minnesota newspaper runs a daily column called “Bulletin Board,” for which readers, using pseudonyms (in this case it was ‘Gigetto on Lincoln’), submit humorous or interesting anecdotes. The term was coined when Mullen submitted a story around 1986, about how he first heard about the terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then heard about it again a short while later from a different source.

Readers suddenly piled on with their own versions of the phenomenon, which quickly came to be known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Today, all similar stories are published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Bulletin Board under the heading “Baader Meinhof Phenomenon.”

The day after reading the above explanation, I came across the following passage on page 59 in the Harper Perennial paperback of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances:

I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi Gal-Chen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, in the immediate wake of learning that “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” describes the déjà vu-like feeling that arises when re-encountering an unusual word or term soon after running into it for the first time*, I recursively experienced that phenomenon by again coming across the phrase “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” in an unrelated source. Was this mildly jarring serendipity evidence of Jung’s collective unconscious, which implies an invisible grid of meaningful connections between apparently isolated events? Or simply dumb coincidence?

(I’d guess Ulrike and Andreas, as good dialectic materialists, would truculently nod their heads for the latter option.)

*I wonder if there is a phrase that describes a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as it applies to people. Viz. when you have just been thinking about somebody you haven’t seen in ages and the person in question turns up, as if summoned by your recollections.

Exhibit A, with a title running radically against the grain of the times, is the supplement “How to spend it.” An aria to conspicuous consumption, this magazine is primarily a vehicle that delivers advertising for Italian haute-couture, yachts, French luggage, business-class travel, and watches costing several months’ after-tax income (that is for plebs who earn less than several hundred grand per year).

Almost indistinguishable from the glossy ads are the glossy articles. In the issue dated Friday April 24, hot subjects addressed included hedge-fund managers learning how to fly jet fighters (an old standby for this kind of supplement), the state of the Bordeaux en primeur market, and the latest trends in underground garages (apparently all the rage among the plutocracy). From the last-named piece, the following insight into how the rich like to spend their time and money is reported with a straight face:

Other car fanatics’ requests verge on the eccentric. Bailey [a buying agent] was involved with one west London project where the client had a glass-box car lift that lowered into a basement where the owner had a Jacuzzi. “He likes to relax by lying back in his Jacuzzi and admiring his Ferrari,” says Baily.

When the British chancellor recently raised the top rate of tax to 50p in the pound, the FT dutifully reported the outrage among its affected demographic. Some objected that the government would simply waste the money. Very possibly it, like most governments, will. But after reading the in-house gazette of their shopping habits, you have to wonder what the hyper-rich see as “squandering.”

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.