In Times of Fading Light’s seven narrators exist in an almost permanent state of bewildered disappointment. Given that the narrators are various generations of the same family, what we’re shown is youthful hope turning recurrently to despair. The story begins in Berlin with Alexander, who is dying, visiting his now demented father, Kurt. This is 2001 and Kurt is at the end of his life, speechless and largely uncomprehending. Alexander, meanwhile, plans to elope to Mexico where his grandparents lived in exile almost 50 years previously. Walking his father through the streets of Berlin, he measures everything against the world he’d known before the fall of the Wall: ‘That was where the butcher had been… And that had been the People’s Bookshop, now a travel agency’.
Kurt, a young communist in an increasingly fascist Germany, went off to fight the cause in Soviet Russia, only to be thrown into a labour camp for an offhand remark on Stalin’s relations with Hitler. He returns to the GDR a historian, a purveyor of Soviet truths. Any dissatisfaction that Kurt might feel only manifests itself in his routine philandering with women he is attracted to and disgusted by in equal measure. Alexander, however, has a more extreme disregard for women. Feeling isolated and disengaged by military service, he attempts to rape his girlfriend when she visits. Eventually, he defects to West Germany, just as now he’ll defect to Mexico — in his mind another anti-Soviet Eden, albeit a more complicated one. Mexico is more pre-Soviet than anti-Soviet, and Alexander, perpetually in search of something better, is going backwards. Perhaps it’s precisely because history seems so important to Alexander that he scorns his father, who filled metres of bookshelves with his research (in true Communist fashion, he was ‘one of the most productive historians of the German Democratic Republic’). Alexander bitterly remembers ‘How all and sundry would hang on his lips as Kurt the professor told his little stories. His anecdotes.’
The book is structurally complicated, flipping back and forth in time. Chapters set in 2001 are generally the ‘present day’ chapters, narrated by Alexander, and the narration routinely slips into them. The only other recurring date is 1 October 1989, which is the scene of Wilhelm’s 90th birthday. Aside from these two frames, the book begins in 1952 and moves forward, skipping several years (or sometimes decades) between chapters. Even though things move generally chronologically, the flash-forwards often reveal things which are then revealed again in their present tense mode. Alexander’s defection to the West, for example, is only a surprise to his parents. But, maybe that’s the point.
Despite this occasional lack of suspense, an early chapter set in 1940s Mexico is masterfully fraught. Its narrator is Charlotte, whose husband Wilhelm is buffoonish, ridiculous and promoted well above his deserts by the Party. Charlotte, meanwhile, is correspondingly witty and slighted by the party. Charlotte spends much of the novel flabbergasted by Wilhelm’s ability to be granted all sorts of alluring medals. Just once she thinks back to a wise suitor who warned her that communists were like Aztecs. Uncertainty burrows into Charlotte’s mind — it produces a rot in the structure of her sentences; there’s a silence where there may have once been words. We have: ‘darkness fell early; the evenings were long. Wilhelm smoked. The fire crackled.’ Or: ‘And as for the twelfth grape, she simply ate it. Without wishing for anything. Suddenly it was gone.’ We then learn that Charlotte’s uncertainty is actually of quite a specific kind: she’s uncertain of whether her son is still alive. Her world has been reduced to quiet facts, to a kind of cataloguing of mechanical operations. Things are present or things are not. People are present or people are not. And with the threat of suddenness in the air, a spare prose style becomes a kind of waiting, just as life does when something crucial is missing.
If this is a novel about self-definition, it is also a novel about where we might draw the line between rebellion and conformity. Alexander rebels in the obvious way, but Irina enjoys the difficulties imposed on the making of Monastery Goose by the GDR’s various rations. To make a Monastery Goose, she thinks, is to demonstrate skill at a particular game — namely wheeling and dealing. After the fall of the Wall, however, everything was ruined. Ingredients could merely be bought in a supermarket and ‘no skill at all was required’. Without strict rules it seemed almost pointless to bother. Markus, meanwhile, would like to be a zoo keeper, ‘but no: electronic communications technician it had to be.’ Walls must be guarded, political parties obeyed, and people seem prone to haunting their descendants. Maybe it isn’t so easy to run away, and youthful hope turns to disillusionment over and over again. At one time Alexander dreamed of Paris, Rome and Mexico, of the West with ‘the Rolling Stones live… Woodstock… nude demos and student riots, its free love and Extra-parliamentary Opposition’. But in the end he is left in Mexico, alone with a newspaper — ‘it is always the same newspaper. Always the one with the airplane flying into a skyscraper.’
In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge is published by Faber (£14.99)
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