Charles Palliser’s Sufferance tells us what happens to one family in an occupied country during wartime. What sets it apart is that all the characters are unnamed. The country, region and historical period also remain unspecified. This indeterminacy lends the novel enormous power.
The father of the family decides to take in a young girl from a minority ethnic group who has become separated from her own family. ‘I felt for her as if she was my own child,’ he says. Yet his motives are not entirely altruistic, since he believes he will be financially rewarded for looking after the girl. He is a lowly accountant working in the public sector and knows the girl’s father is the wealthy owner of a large department store.
Then official restrictions on the girl’s ethnic group are implemented, and tighten. The father has colleagues from the same ethnic group as the girl, who start to disappear from his workplace: ‘Nobody ever mentioned them or asked where they had gone.’ Family members realise that harbouring the girl is placing them at risk, and the trap they have fallen into steadily worsens as racial persecution mounts. The description of how fear and stress exacerbate tensions within the household is as skilful as it is disturbing.
Palliser’s approach to the Holocaust appears blindingly obvious. Even so, to the best of this reviewer’s knowledge, no one has used it in literary fiction before. There is a parallel with Anna Burns’s Milkman, yet though that novel’s setting was also unspecified, it was clearly Belfast during the Troubles. Sufferance cannot be tied down so easily, enabling Palliser to suggest that the Holocaust could happen again, anywhere, any time. We are pulled into a confrontation with evil that it is easy to imagine happening here and now. Sufferance could well become a contemporary classic.
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