This is one of those purchases based on little more than the anticipated need for a shorter, quicker, lighter read (post-Franzen), a vague wish to read something by a new (to me) author, and some Waterstone's in-store marketing. Short and quick it certainly was, but "light" might be doing it something of a disservice.
Picking this book up in a bookshop, this book looks like a fairly standard-issue work of crime fiction, albeit with the apparently fashionable twist that it is foreign. (I suppose that, after Scandinavian noir, it was time for a dalliance with the German Krimi.) On reading however, this is rather distant from your standard whodunnit, with over half of the book elapsing before the (I am told) familiar figure of defence counsel, Konrad Biegler, comes on the scene to deal with a crime we only discover to have occurred at that point. Prior to that, the story is entirely the life story of the central protagonist, Sebastian von Eschburg.
Eschburg hails from a fading, dysfunctional aristocratic Bavarian family, living out a childhood between a slowly disintegrating Schloss and a cold-showerly traditional boarding school and a slowly disintegrating family. Slowly, at least until the day when the young Eschberg goes hunting with his father, witnesses the evisceration of a deer and something even more traumatising. The boy, later man, lives, somehow seemingly almost contentedly, on the borders of autism, observing the world rather than participating in it, perceiving reality not as most do, but in shades of colour. It is a predisposition he turns to his advantage, as he becomes a photographer, increasingly feted in the art world, though also increasingly drawn to dark, edgy and even criminally pornographic subject matter.
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| Ferdinand von Schirach |
On 18 October, along with some 1500 other people, I went to the Bozar concert hall in Brussels, to see the latest crowd-pulling international star packing them in the course of a European tour. No, not Barenboim; not Yo-Yo Ma either, but superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen. He who has been said to embody The Great American Novelist.
For an American writer to pack out an event in a major concert hall, in a city where English is not even the national language, is fair evidence of his status, and indeed, after we had all endured a rather embarrassing and unnecessary introduction from Flemish writer Saskia De Coster, Franzen delivered for the fans, answering questions from interviewer Annelies Beck (who, by contrast, did a great job) and from the audience with dry and witty aplomb. He also read two extracts from Purity, one relating the purloining of a nuclear missile for the purposes of enhanced sexual gratification in a trashy Texan relationship, the other a conversation between leading character, Tom Aberant, and his former wife, Anabel Laird, aka Penelope Tyler, in the course of which he is persuaded via a rambling, disconnected exchange to go to visit her (something they, and we, know to be a terrible idea). The latter extract in particular showed off Franzen's extraordinary talent for combining great emotional depth with painful but laugh-out-loud comedy. As it happens, I saw this same extract cited by Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, who did a recent Lunch with the FT interview with Franzen, as having left her "slack-jawed with admiration", but wondering "what his ex-wife would have made of it".
I have remarked on those Franzen sentences before, the ones that stop you in your tracks with admiration for the sheer skill with which he employs language. Purity offers many such moments, though - and I can bring no hard statistics to the table on this - perhaps not with the sheer number of them as we saw in The Corrections or in Freedom. This novel felt just slightly more concerned with the story, in slightly more of a hurry to get on with it, and in fact I was surprised at the speed I was turning the pages, especially in the earlier parts of the novel. Of course, this is still a long book, and a correspondingly long read, but somehow it felt just slightly less effortful than the two previous blockbusters.
