Tangled Web UK Review July 2008
The Murder Farm by
Andrea Maria Schenkel
hbk out June 08
Published by Quercus
at £9.99
At first glance, Andrea Maria Schenkel’s spare, haunting debut novel is an account of the circumstances surrounding a terrible crime. An anonymous narrator returns to the scene of a post-war childhood idyll, drawn by the fact that this rural Bavarian community has since acquired a terrible notoriety: the inhabitants of a local farmhouse were all slaughtered one night some years previously, perpetrator unknown. There the narrator collects and presents the testimony of those involved.
In fact the guiding intelligence of the novelist is present from the opening paragraph of page one. The incident being recounted is a true one, but one that took place in 1922. The author has transferred it, almost entirely reinventing it in the process, to the 1950s. This change, for instance, just five lines in, enables her to refer to Tannöd, her fictional location (and the German title for the book), as "an island of peace... one of the last places to survive intact" after the (implied) devastating large-scale bombing of Germany in the closing stages of World War II, until recently a subject (with a few notable exceptions) off limits in German fiction. It is the first of many such references to post-war German history that provide context and add texture to Schenkel’s picture of this apparently isolated community, bringing to mind the first series of Heimat, Edgar Reitz’s stunning TV portrayal of another such group, this time in the pre-war era.
Another effective element in the book is the use throughout of large chunks of incantory religious verse, in fact a Catholic litany used at services in memory of the dead. Most of all, a present-tense omniscient narrator is also soon at work, adding at first stark vignettes of both the men and (particularly) the stoic women of the area, and then, later, the ‘missing’ pieces of the puzzle.
Schenkel juggles these various elements like a master, sometimes jumping forward in the story, sometimes back, sometimes creating false trails, always adding some insight, keeping the reader off balance and continually alert, whilst building considerable suspense in the process.
At first I was troubled by the tabloid implications of the English title, justified though it is by the translated text (smoothly rendered by Anthea Bell, the veteran translator of, for example, W.G. Sebald, coincidentally the author of one of the key texts mentioned early in this review). In the end though it works - in ironic counterpoint to the subtlety of the book, notably Schenkel’s restrained (but highly effective) treatment of the appalling violence at the centre of the novel, as well as her moving portrayal of the individual who, we finally deduce, is the perpetrator of the crime.
Several times a prize-winner and a huge best-seller in her native Germany (as was Schenkel’s second book, due from Quercus next year), this is a remarkable first novel that fully deserves your support.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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