The Russian Passenger by
Günter Ohnemus
pbk out March 04
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £9.99
Perhaps the least mainstream of Bitter Lemon's first salvo of translated crime fiction,
The Russian Passenger starts with great promise. "At fifty the good Buddhist takes to
the road, leaving all his belongings behind, his sole possession a begging bowl...The
problem was, there were four million dollars in my begging bowl and the mafia were
after me."
An on-the-run Zen thriller then, fast cars and not a few fast women? Not quite. The
protagonist is 52 year-old Harry Willemer, once a writer, now a Munich taxi-driver
with a broken marriage and a dead child on his conscience. A few years before he had cast
all his belongings to the wind to live an ascetic life in a one room flat. Until, one day,
his taxi is hailed by Sonia, an ex-KGB agent and wife of a current Russian mafia
boss. Together they set off to claim the "pension" Sonia reckons she is due. Forced to
despatch the hit-men sent to recover the money, the pair are soon fleeing headlong
across Europe, then to the States, Harry recording events and thoughts "to stave off
fear and this ocean of time that will sooner or later wash me away."
The thriller-ish aspects of the book are everything you could wish for. Nicely
paced, the action comes crisp and fast, the naturalistic dialogue reads well, the twists
and turns of the plot, in genre terms, are convincing, the all-pervading paranoia well
conveyed. Fluently translated by John Brownjohn, there is little doubt that you will
keep reading to its hauntingly ambiguous conclusion.
But the novel is also a vehicle for Harry/Ohnemus's thoughts on his past and
future. These range from a tirade or two on the meagreness of publisher's advances
and the "strange life" of book reviewers, to a three page extract from A Confederate
General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan (for whom Ohnemus is a key translator
into German). Relevant? You decide.
Fortunately Harry is also given to musing on the women in his life. "My dear boy,
you were made for women" his mother once told him. Why then did his relationship
with Ellen his wife end so disastrously? Should he take up once again with his first
love, Susannah Timmerman (to whom the book is mysteriously dedicated)? Does his
relationship with Sonia have any future? Combined with the realities of Harry's flight,
these reminiscences contribute hugely to the book's atmosphere of doomed
romanticism, which at times reminded me of Marc Behm's hallucinatory Eye of the
Beholder. And as the book concludes, it has become clear that its major theme is
something more than just 'the cruel history that binds Russia and Germany' (as the
blurb has it). All in all, a fascinating ride, one for lovers of the unconventional.
"The best that can happen" writes Harry/Ohnemus about book reviewers, is that
what they write " will encourage people to buy the book." How did I do?
The Russian Passenger by
Günter Ohnemus
