FICTION: HILARY FANNINreviews The MomentBy Douglas Kennedy Hutchinson, 488pp. £9.99
DOUGLAS KENNEDY'S 10th novel, The Moment, a tome running to almost 500 pages, is weighty enough to crush any doubts about this prolific author's status as a stylish popular novelist and classy purveyor of the gripping yarn.
An American with homes in Europe, Kennedy formerly studied at Trinity College Dublin and was briefly at the helm of the Peacock Theatre. In his latest page-turner – the term “unputdownable” has followed Kennedy through his career like a persistent stray – the author has plucked Thomas Nesbitt, a young American intellectual with a burgeoning career as a travel writer, from his well-ordered Manhattan life and thrown him to the European lions.
Nesbitt, unlike his creator, manages to avoid the rain and recession of Dublin in the early 1980s and instead finds himself heading into the edgy, hedonistic mayhem of west Berlin.
Set in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Orwellian overtones are clear when Nesbitt becomes romantically involved with a young east Berliner, Petra Dussmann, a former Stasi prisoner now working as a translator in the west.
Dussmann is everything you would expect of an east Berlin frau fatale: thin, sad, delicate, with hauntingly beautiful eyes and a tiny hole in her opaque black tights just above her bony knee. And Nesbitt, too, steps up to the nonconformist mark as the heroic young American charged with falling madly in love with her, all the while negotiating the vagaries of his adopted city in an ever-increasing series of black turtleneck sweaters.
Despite the sartorial cliches Nesbitt is a compelling and erudite character whose exhaustingly glib repartee with assorted misfits can be forgiven in view of his comprehensive knowledge of German literature and his ability to draw out the personal stories of those he encounters. Some of these characters can appear almost stock, of a type peculiar to cold-war novels. There is the redneck American intelligence officer, hiding his cultural nous under his straining belt; the oleaginous, predatory Stasi brute, resplendent in filthy vest and yellowing Y-fronts; and, more innovatively, the gay Anglo-Irish junkie artist with whom Nesbitt shares a crumbling apartment.
But it is Berlin itself, a city cleaved apart by a paranoid construct of barbed wire and brick, that remains the most complex, austere and alluring of Kennedy’s characterisations.
This almost scarily efficiently plotted novel opens 25 years after the end of the love affair that is its main subject. Nesbitt, now in his 50s and living a largely solitary existence in Maine, receives delivery of a large manila envelope postmarked Berlin. This older Nesbitt is coming to terms both with his shattered distant past and with the recent dissolution of his long marriage. “A failed marriage is also a death – a living one,” he writes, scrutinising those moments in life that, on reflection, adhere people to their fate.
It is this quality of evaluation, this conscious appraisal of unforeseen loss, of gallant naivety, of the bullish youthful belief in the right to happiness, that sets Kennedy’s work apart from that of many other popular novelists.
Albeit that The Momentoffers little new in the way of telling the story of a febrile love divided by an authoritarian state, it is a gripping read and an honest attempt to address human frailty while "playing out our minor destinies" in the face of great love and desperate loss.
“When is the past not a spectral hall of shadows?” the narrator asks himself. “When we can live with it,” he replies.
Hilary Fannin is a playwright and journalist
