Enigmatic reading: "The Girl Who Wasn't There" by Ferdinand von Schirach

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.

Ferdinand von Schirach

It is only on page 127 (of 216 in my edition) that we find out that a crime has been committed, and, in a sort of predictable semi-shock, that Eschburg is the accused. But even here, we don't get down to straightforward Krimi business. The ensuing investigation, featuring worldly-wise defence attorney Biegler, is anything but your standard-issue painstaking uncovering of the facts, with the usual red-herrings strewn along the way, but an exploration of truth, perspectives on truth, guilt, justice and all that. 

To be honest, this bit was for me the less interesting half of the book. Biegler is admittedly a good character. I met him for only the first time here, and he charms (if that is the word) rapidly with his old-guy German, slightly-but-not-entirely cynical, cigarillo-smoking pre-disposition to be impatiently pissed-off with the world in general. But I still couldn't help wondering if all the investment in page 1 to 126 deserved a different payoff, something more than the genre-conforming conclusion we are given, albeit with a mighty twist. The twist is good, but, I have to say, well-flagged, to the extent that the only real question for the reader is exactly what the twist will be. In that sense, it is, perhaps, slightly anti-climactic when it comes.

So a powerful story, shoehorned into a reductive format? Yes, actually. Von Schirach is a writer of real talent; the first half of the book (and, to a degree, the second) amply confirm that. But it is hard to escape the feeling that so much more could have been done with this.

Original cover.
Of course, in English, the word
"Girl" is obligatory.
(Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train,
The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, etc.)
More shoehorning, methinks.