The second World War is a story that won't release its hold, and Justin Cartwright's latest novel is a tale worth telling, writes Eileen Battersby.
And still the war. History continues spinning its story of conflict and celebration, discovery and horror. Yet no matter what new chapter is written, novelists and film-makers remain preoccupied by the events of the second World War.
Writer Justin Cartwright sits in a Dublin hotel and smiles his wry smile, spreading his hands before him in good-natured agreement. "It is the big story. Writers continue returning to it, it still affects people - look at [ Günter] Grass's predicament - it still haunts people, people like him who were around then and people who have come after him. And there are so many different aspects to it, the war." That war, the story that won't release its hold.
His new book, The Song Before It Is Sung, draws on the facts of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944. "I didn't make up the facts, the facts are there. But what really drew me to it was the idea of a friendship and the betrayal of that friendship." It is a theme that features in his work, but this time it was a specific friendship, one that existed between the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, a Prussian aristocrat who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Von Trott was an idealist and, in common with many of the Junker class, saw Hitler as an aberration. Yet Berlin and others became suspicious of Von Trott and, instead of assisting him in his efforts to win American support, dismissed him as a Nazi.
The novel, in which Berlin has become fictional philosopher and Oxford professor Elya Mendel, a Jew who is friendly with Axel von Gottberg, comes as something of a surprise. The story of their friendship and von Gottberg's subsequent barbaric death is entrusted by Mendel to one of his former students, Conrad Senior - not the most brilliant, but the one with the most well developed sense of humanity. Senior has his own personal problems and so his task becomes a welcome diversion and obsession.
Since the publication in 1995 of In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize, Cartwright has emerged as a perceptive and witty chronicler of contemporary British life. This was consolidated by Half In Lovein 2001, which took on, among several other things, British politics and the tabloid press, and then, in 2004, The Promise of Happiness, a colourful account of one family's battle to make sense of their situation. He could be described as a British John Updike who just happens to be South African. Cartwright laughs out loud and says, with the enthusiasm which makes him such fun to be with, "I love John Updike, I think he is a fine writer" and proceeds to list off his favourite Updike books. Cartwright, who has been claimed by the British literary establishment in a way similar to that ownership initially conferred on William Trevor, does not regard himself as caught between the two cultures.
"I'm a kind of South African. I mean I have lived in England since I was 19, so I have spent much more of my life there. My sons are English, my wife is English and I think I understand England," he laughs; he says "thinks" but he really means "knows". There is little doubt about that understanding. It was evident in Look at It This Way, while In Every Face I Meetoffers a vivid portrait of 1990s London as the backdrop to a horrific series of events that combine to destroy Anthony Northbeach, who pays the price for his friendship with Mike, as Mike in turn pays for being Anthony's buddie. It is a terrific, urbane novel that built quite brilliantly on the success of Masai Dreaming, his fifth book, and breakthrough novel.
CARTWRIGHT BEGAN WRITINGbooks in the mid 1980s. "There were two thrillers, which I'd rather not talk about," he says, as if they were meals that were less than memorable.
On leaving Oxford, a place which would prove very important to him, not only as a cultural experience but as a source for his subsequent writing - "it is beautiful and romantic, it has such history, I'm working on one of those 'the writer's city' books about it" - he worked in advertising and film: "Both of which are very rich material for my fiction." He has contemporary England, but he also has Africa and it retains a vital presence. His third book, and first real serious in the sense of satisfying novel, Interior, is set in Africa and he refers to it as "my first African book". This is true, but Masai Dreaming, with its Parisian interludes, is his African book. In it are the seeds of the book that would become The Song Before It Is Sung.
His native South Africa and his early life there have also infiltrated his fiction. He was born in 1945 in Cape Town and will be 62 next month, but says, "you had better not put that in, or your readers won't see me as young and promising". His father was a journalist and newspaper editor. "I saw how hard he worked. Cape Town is beautiful and old style, very European. When my father got a job on a Johannesburg paper, we moved there. It is much bigger, much more African. My brother and I went to boarding school, and later I went to university there before going to Oxford. I suppose I was 19 and I wanted to get out, so I went to England."
But not before he had had something of a track career in South Africa. "I was the fastest white boy in the world for something like five minutes." Cartwright ran 100 yards in 10.3 seconds in 1964 while still 18. It converts to 11.2 seconds for 100 metres and, as he says, "it was quite good at the time, but everybody is a lot faster now, women are running that now". True, but then track surfaces are also faster.
So Cartwright the boy sprinter inspired part of the story of White Lightning- "I was white lightning" - which was published in 2001 and is his most personal book. It is also a tender, often sad, humane and eloquent work. "I was waiting for my mother to die. I wasn't waiting with eagerness or curiosity or sadness - she was very old - but with a fullness of heart, as though into that tricky organ a lot of history and deception and regret had flooded. My heart was pumped full with this accumulation of feeling."
The likeable, all-too-human narrator is another of Cartwright's middle-aged men on the run from his life and himself. As he sits by his mother's bed, watching her, he reports "her face is almost unbearable to look at because it is giving a preview of death, her mouth gaping, seeking the boundaries of the skull . . . I have a curious notion suddenly, that I should lie next to her and die with her, to keep her company."
A conversation with Cartwright is fast moving. He has a quick mind and is a reader, interested in many things, including all aspects of culture and horses - diverting into his day hunting in Scotland: "I wrote a piece about it."
Early in the interview, he asks if I like the work of JM Coetzee. When I say he is one of my heroes, Cartwright is delighted and praises his countryman as "a real writer, a true artist" and adds: "I think The Master of Petersburgis his masterpiece." He also has a high regard for Nadine Gordimer, of whom he speaks warmly.
Of course he is aware that his long absence has left him off the South African literary roll of honour in some eyes. So he laughs with pleasure on recalling that he was recently introduced as "South Africa's second-greatest writer".
Cartwright will probably read from The Song Before It Is Sungat the Cúirt International Festival of Literature this week. It has been well reviewed and it is a subtle, layered and convincing work. There is no polemic and no sentimentality, despite his obvious sympathy for von Gottberg. "Well, when I saw the footage of his trial and his serenity at his show trial [Cartwright is referring to the film footage he saw at the Imperial War Museum while researching his forthcoming book on Oxford and he acknowledges this in his afterword], I thought to myself, 'God, this man had a horrible death,' and so it became a novel." Fiction for Cartwright is important. "It tells truths, it looks at life. I try to write books that are civilised and imaginative but are also savvy about life and streetwise."
Referring again to Günter Grass, he says: "It's not that he's forgotten about his involvement, he never believed in it." Of the unfair accusations of Nazi sympathiser that one reviewer directed at Cartwright, he says: "I couldn't understand why he could have said that. I'm not making any defence of the Nazis; these Prussian Junkers wanted to get rid of Hitler. As for my insulting the memory of all the people that died because of Hitler, well, that's pretty serious stuff." Cartwright remains impressively good natured and stands by his belief that life is a black business but it is also good fun. For all the awards he has won, he remains the best breed of writer, one excited by writing.
The Song Before It Is Sung is published by Bloomsbury, €25.32.
