Waiting for the Barbarians (38 page)

But surely the notion that the bad guys aren’t bona fide aristocrats and the good guys are is suspect. Similarly, however delicious the lampoon of the nouveaux riches Thatcherites may be in
The Line of Beauty
, you can’t help noticing the unspoken assumptions that lie
behind the depictions of many of the vulgar right-wingers in whose company Nick Guest becomes immersed. What, exactly, are we being asked to conclude about the crass “new” England when we learn, of one member of Nick’s new circle, that the grand Duchess of Flintshire was once “plain Sharon Feingold”? This awkward and, I’m sure, unconscious inclination on Hollinghurst’s part is worth mentioning because it inevitably weakens the force of his larger critique.
^*

You have to wonder what is being critiqued in the new book. Bad design? “These plans!” the Daphne of 1926 says, when she is mistress of Corley, as she glimpses a glamorous lady decorator’s plans to box over its gaudy splendors. “We’re not going to know ourselves
soon.” The way in which we can become unrecognizable to ourselves is, as we know, a large theme here. But whereas that destabilizing loss of certainty led, in the earlier books, to a salutary new consciousness—Will Beckwith, for instance, finally learns who he and his family truly are by the end of
The Swimming-Pool Library
—what marks
The Stranger’s Child
is a strong nostalgia for the old style of life. More strongly, indeed, than in the previous novels, a palpable aura of regret runs through this book, almost a resistance to the present. I lost count of the number of times that characters mournfully say things like “No one remembered the rememberers.”

Something about all this isn’t right. While it appeals to a certain taste in popular entertainment, which cannot get enough of “old” England—
Downton Abbey
, most recently, to say nothing of
Upstairs, Downstairs
, the endless succession of Austen and Forster adaptations; a taste that, I suspect, will make
The Stranger’s Child
the most popular of Hollinghurst’s books yet—this abundant tenderness for an England long past sits ill with the other story that’s being told here, however atrophied it is: the subversive gay story, which reminds us of what often lay behind those impressive or charming façades: the class arrogance, the middle-class “niceness” that ruined so many lives. Mrs. Sawle’s discovery of Cecil’s love letters to George triggers a confrontation so traumatic that George ends up trapped for the rest of his life in an airless marriage to a dour lady academic.

And so there’s a strange waffling at the heart of
The Stranger’s Child
. I was struck by the author’s complicated sympathy for Paul Bryant, who can’t decide if he wants to cheat Daphne’s family or infiltrate them (he ends up doing both); and wondered whether, like Paul—like many of us gay men over the past generation, with its galvanizing traumas and its great successes, too—Hollinghurst the writer can no longer quite decide who he stands with: the “queer” outsiders or the establishment. With its sepia regrets and wry chuckling over
its harmlessly wayward characters,
The Stranger’s Child
is not the book you’d have thought this author was likely to end up writing, back in the days of Will Beckwith’s long showers at the gym. Like Cecil’s tomb, it’s “a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper,” as George admits; but one in which—as he murmurs while gazing at the curiously insufficient marble likeness—you “don’t quite feel” you’ve found the person you once knew.

—The New York Review of Books
, November 10, 2011

LIKE ORESTES, THE
hero of the Greek tragedy to which its title alludes—and which, according to its author, has from the start provided his novel with its “underlying structure”—
The Kindly Ones
has been both extravagantly blessed and hideously cursed. Published in France in 2006 as
Les Bienveillantes
, it was immediately crowned with the most prestigious critical garlands: not only rapturous reviews but also both the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. It was, too, gilded by an astonishing commercial success, selling more than 700,000 copies in France and commanding enormous advances from foreign publishers (nearly $600,000 for German rights alone, and a reputed seven figures for the US rights). This combination of kudos and euros, together with a subject matter that is, to put it mildly, sensational—the book, which runs to nearly a thousand pages, takes the form of a memoir of an SS officer who, apart from the wartime activities that he recalls in meticulous detail, is also a homosexual matricide who has an incestuous relationship with his twin sister—has had a large part in giving the novel the
luster of triumph and excess that accompanies its arrival on foreign shores.

As for the curses, these have been abundant, too—starting in France itself. Claude Lanzmann, whose epic documentary
Shoah
Jonathan Littell has referred to as an inspiration for his book, was not alone there in denouncing what he called the novel’s “decor of death,” the way in which, as some critics saw it, the book and, perhaps, its author seem to revel in offering graphic details of atrocities.

It comes as no surprise that a book that is preoccupied with giving a persuasive account of what it would be like to be an ostensibly civilized person who ends up doing unimaginably uncivilized things should, for the most part, have been enthusiastically embraced and, to a far lesser extent, vigorously resisted in a country that has such a tortured historic relationship to questions of collaboration and resistance. For the same reason, perhaps, you’re not surprised to learn that the most violent criticism of the “monstrous” book’s “kitsch” and “pornography of violence” has come from Germany and Israel: the countries, that is to say, of the perpetrators and the victims. The critic of
Die Zeit
bitterly asked why she should

The answer to that impatient query surely has something to do with the novel’s large ambitions, which precisely address the question of why we would be interested in how an educated person could abandon himself to racist ideology, and what the ramifications of that abandonment might look like. Some of these ambitions are brilliantly
realized; others much less so. But all of them make Littell’s book a serious one, deserving of serious treatment.

The key to these ambitions lies in the complex resonances of the novel’s title.
Bienveillantes
is the French rendering of the classical Greek word
eumenides
: the “well-meaning” or “kindly” ones, the ritual appellation rather hopefully used to designate the awful supernatural beings far better known to us as the Erinyes, or Furies. In Aeschylus’
Oresteia
—a work that Littell’s novel repeatedly invokes, from the protagonist’s casual reference to his closest friend as his “Pylades” to large plot elements, not the least of which is his apparent murder of his mother and her second husband—the hero Orestes is pursued by these awful, slavering, dog-faced creatures, whose province is the punishment of kin murder, after he kills his mother, Clytemnestra, in a divinely ordained retribution for her murder of Orestes’ father, Agamemnon. (Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order to win favorable winds for his fleet’s journey to Troy.)

The heart of the trilogy is in fact a competition between the claims of vengeance and the claims of justice: not for nothing does its climax, in the third play, take the form of a trial scene. For
Eumenides
ends with Orestes being acquitted by a newly instituted formal court of law, a result that enrages the Furies, who are finally appeased with a promise that they will henceforth no longer be reviled bogies but incorporated into the life of the Athenian state and given a new home beneath the Acropolis. In accordance with their new, rather domesticated status, their name gets prettified, too: instead of the dreadful Furies they will henceforth be known as the Eumenides, “the kindly ones.” And yet it is hard not to feel that this ostensibly happy ending has disturbing overtones: How tame, really, do we think these superficially redubbed Furies will be?

To name a literary work after the third play in Aeschylus’ trilogy,
then, is to invoke, with extreme self-consciousness, two related themes: one having to do with civilization in general, and the other with human nature. The former concerns justice, its nature and uses: how it is instituted, and then executed, how much it conflicts with, regulates, and possibly appeases the more primitive thirst for vengeance, which it is meant to supersede. The latter concerns the unsettling way in which, beneath even the most pleasant, “kindly” exteriors, dark and potentially violent forces lurk. Neither, needless to say, is restricted to Greek tragedy, or classical civilization; if anything, both are intimately connected to the main preoccupation of Littell’s novel, the German program of extermination during World War II.

The Kindly Ones
comprises two large structural elements intended to explore these questions. The first is the historical/documentary plot—that is to say, the meticulous chronological re-creation of Maximilien Aue’s wartime career from 1941 to 1945, which allows us to track Germany’s career, too: from the mass graves in eastern Poland and the Ukraine, following Operation Barbarossa, to Babi Yar and Kiev, to the Caucasus, and thence (after he irritates a senior officer who punishes him by sending him to the front) to the disaster at Stalingrad, then back to Berlin where he becomes a favorite of Himmler and Eichmann; then a stint in Paris which allows him to catch up with friends from his student days, collaborators who, like many of the characters, are real historical figures (Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet); then a posting to Auschwitz in 1943, and finally, the fall of Berlin itself, which finds the Zelig-like Aue in Hitler’s bunker. This itinerary allows Aue to be both eyewitness to and participant in the atrocities—and, because this narrator is an educated, reasonable-seeming man, allows the reader some access to the mentality of a perpetrator.

The second structural element is the mythic/sexual: that is, the entirety of the
Oresteia
story, superimposed on the primary narrative
and consisting of flashbacks to Aue’s earlier life and of events transpiring in the wartime present, which establishes him as a latter-day Orestes. He is obsessed with his soldier father’s disappearance at the end of the Great War, and with what he sees as the unforgivable betrayal of his father by his “odious bitch” mother. (“It’s as if they had murdered him.… What a disgrace! For their shameful desires!”) He has an unnatural closeness to his Electra-like twin sister, Una, which turns out to be incestuous. (This is a nod to Chateaubriand’s
René
, a Gothic tale of brother-sister incest, one of the many French novels that preside over Littell’s text; the sibling-incest theme is also a notorious element in the work of the twelfth century German bard Hartmann von Aue, whose name Littell has borrowed for his hero). He kills, or at least believes he has killed, his mother and her second husband, in a scene closely modeled on Greek myth, including the mother’s desperate baring of her breast to her ax-wielding son. He is pursued relentlessly by agents of punishment—in this case, a pair of noirish detectives given the suggestive names of Weser and Clemens. (These were the names of the two Gestapo officers who, in real life, harrassed Victor Klemperer, the German Jew whose diaries,
I Will Bear Witness
, have become an indispensable document for the study of the history of the Holocaust—characterized, you might say, by the same proportion of narrative drama and mundane, meticulous, sometimes tedious detail that you find in Littell’s novel.) All this is overlaid with increasingly elaborately narrated sexual fantasies and activities, culminating in an onanistic orgy at his sister’s abandoned house as the Russians enter Pomerania.