The Emperor Waltz is long enough at 600 pages to be divided, in the old-fashioned way, into nine ‘books’. Each book has a date, sliding from 1922 to 1979 to next year to 203 ad to last month. This might suggest an overly systematic novel in the mode of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning breezeblock The Luminaries. But Hensher has always been a writer with a wandering, curious eye (on its most exhilarating display in 2011’s King of the Badgers), and The Emperor Waltz is a novel that, despite its superficial restraints, won’t sit still.
It begins in Weimar during the period of hyperinflation, a time of bold new ideas and failures of conscience, when the competing energies of Bauhaus and National Socialism are starting to make themselves known. Christian, a young art student, is seduced by the promise of the city; a Berlin poster has informed him that in Weimar ‘everything would alter… for the better’.
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