FICTION: ANNA CAREYreviews The History of History: A Novel of BerlinBy Ida Hattemer-Higgins Faber Faber, 319pp. £12.99
THE PROBLEM WITH a novel about a character’s descent into madness is that one can’t help feeling it was probably much more interesting to write than it is to read. For a writer, a character suffering from pyschosis, hallucinations and mania can be an opportunity to show off, to create an impressive imaginary world, to twist language in new, manic ways. For the reader, however, all of this can be unbearably tedious. Sadly, that’s the case with Ida Hattemer-Higgins’s ambitious debut novel.
The History of Historyis the story of Margaret Taub, a young American working as a tour guide in Berlin. When the novel begins Margaret has woken up in a forest outside the city. There are huge holes in her memory, but this doesn't seem to trouble her especially. She continues with her solitary life, increasingly gripped by the strange idea that the passage of time has stopped and the world is coming to an end. Then, two years later, she receives an enigmatic letter from a strange gynaecologist, reminding her of an appointment she has no memory of making.
Curious, Margaret attends the doctor, a blind woman who shows her a strange film that she claims will have a profound effect on her. Margaret accepts the doctor’s strange behaviour and gnomic statements almost without question, but shortly after the visit she finds that the city is transformed. All the buildings are suddenly made of living flesh.
With its illogical and mysterious authority figures and grotesque transformations, there are obvious and self-conscious echoes of Kafka here, but the similarities are only superficial. Kafka wrote in beautifully clear, direct German, the clarity of his style throwing the nightmarish situations he described into stark relief. Hattemer-Higgins’s style, however, is florid and heavy-handed, and almost wilfully awkward; it frequently reads as though the text has been ineptly translated from another language. Perhaps she was trying to evoke a German- speaking world, but there’s nothing particularly Germanic about her clumsy sentences.
And the story is clumsy, too, as Margaret wanders through the fleshy city and gradually becomes obsessed with two very different women in Nazi Germany. One is Magda Goebbels, wife of the infamous propaganda minister, who killed her children in Hitler’s bunker before killing herself. The other is a Jewish woman named Regina Strauss, who also killed her children and herself, but for very different reasons. Magda appears to Margaret in the form of a grotesque bird-like woman; Regina joins Margaret for a game of cards.
As more of her personal history is revealed to both the reader and Margaret herself, she becomes increasingly drawn to Germany's past, buying an original edition of Mein Kampfat a flea market, and we're told that "the Nazi past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow". And the city of Berlin, we're led to believe, is a living entity that, like Margaret, is obsessed with the past while wilfully forgetting its darker periods.
The suggested parallels between Margaret's emotional troubles and Berlin's Nazi past, however, are offensively trite. This isn't helped by the fact that Margaret feels like a collection of delusions, obsessions and neuroses – she's not a particularly interesting or convincing character. It's hard to care about her or her mysterious secrets. There are a few arresting images in The History of History: the city made of skin is an effective and vividly depicted (if revolting) idea, as is another of Margaret's delusions, the rope ladders that suddenly hang from the clouds all over the city. But a couple of interesting images isn't enough to make this unpleasant book worth reading.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her first book for young adults, The Real Rebecca, is published next month by the O'Brien Press
