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Wednesday 8 October 2008

A choice of first novels

Christian House recommends a selection of first novels

The ghost of Harry Lime seems to be haunting the publishing houses of London. Graham Greene’s infamous anti-hero may have come to a sticky end in the Viennese sewers but his spirit lives on in several debut novels immersed in the noir world of post-war Europe.

Hedi Kaddour’s Waltenburg (Harvill/ Secker, £20) is the most wide-ranging and ambitious of these. The book begins with the maelstrom inflicted on a French cavalry unit during the Great War before coursing through the second world war to the principal narrative of a 1950s CIA operation. The Hotel Waldhaus in the Swiss mountain village of Waltenburg proves the hub around which a German writer, an American singer, a French journalist and a shady, unidentified mole love and betray one another. Kaddour’s idiosyncratic prose, which plays fast and loose with grammatical convention, is as creative as a black market passport. The result is a long read (at 640 pages) but one that still manages to grip like an ill-gotten dossier.

Less panoramic perhaps but equally atmospheric, Dan Vyleta’s Pavel & I (Bloomsbury, £12.99) does for Berlin what The Third Man achieved for Vienna. The city sparkles like drizzle in lamp light. Vyleta has created a paean to the morally bereft, economically turbulent times when the metropolis found itself caught in a particularly unsettling vacuum, book- ended by the armistice and the blockade. This is the winter of 1946 with

people freezing in their unheated flats, impoverished, hungry, scraping together something less than a living from the crumbs that fell from their occupiers’ tables.

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