Counterfactual thinking can be compelling. We imagine love affairs missed out on, tragedies averted. What if I hadn’t boarded that bus or woken from that sleep? Sam Taylor throws this thinking into a vital moment in a young boy’s life that has massive, world- historical resonance.
Vienna, 1933. Nazi sympathisers burn down the flat of a Jewish family. Max Spiegelman, aged 13, escapes, but his parents burn to death. Or do they? In a parallel narrative, Max awakes from this dream into the very fire he’s just dreamed about, early enough to rescue his parents. Taylor alternates the stories of the Max whose parents survive and who remains on the right side of history, eventually joining the Resistance in Paris, and the Max who’s taken in by neighbours who rename him Hans and clothe him in the fortifying uniform of the Hitler youth and then the SS. Night after night, Max and Hans dream of each other, united and divided by their love of Sophie Strom, the French-German girl Max met just before the fire.
I found the book compulsive even as I worried about the vision. Max’s dreams aren’t recognisably dreams: they’re cogent filmic narratives that become crucial plot points as the novel develops into a kind of thriller. But there’s a lot of talk about psychoanalysis, and Max even writes to Freud about his dreams. So there’s the suggestion that Max is splitting into a good and bad self – that this Jewish boy longs on some level to be a Nazi until a late stage in the war. It’s not a thought experiment I found enlightening.
What I admired was Taylor’s astonishingly capacious world-building. Minor characters are sensitively drawn, and Sophie is an unpredictable, captivating figure, true to her feelings to the point of sometimes betraying her principles. In an occasionally over-determined novel, there are electrifying bursts of imagination at work in the love stories.
How is this enhanced by the metafictional apparatus? Perhaps if our own world can feel like it has taken some bizarre wrong turn, it’s helpful to go back to this time of moral certainties and consider paths not taken. Why didn’t we manage to keep hold of the world Max lives in at the end – one where the goodies have won but are self-knowing enough to forgive their vanquished enemies? It’s a worthwhile thought, but I’m left speculating about other versions of this novel, wishing Taylor had either committed fully to the thriller or approached the psychoanalytic material with less of a thesis and more of the open-ended curiosity he shows when up close with his characters’ most troubling feelings.
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