Darkenbloom by Eva Menasse. Translated by Charlotte Collins

Scribe, £20

Reviewed by Jennifer Lipman

If I hadn’t been reviewing Darkenbloom, I might have abandoned it 100 pages in, despairing at the Shakespearean-sized cast, the idiosyncratic characters with Germanic names and muddled back-stories, and the many baffling interludes which left the plot in peril of slipping away. I’m glad I didn’t, because suddenly Austrian writer Eva Menasse’s novel became utterly gripping and all those detours and quirks began to fall into place.

It's 1989, on the Austrian side of the border with Hungary, and the Soviet grip is crumbling. In backwater Darkenbloom, in thrall to an absent countess and still wedded to ancient farming ways, it’s been a long half century since the war. For the younger residents, including the newly returned Lowetz and the young teacher Flocke, the Hitler era is ancient history. To their parents and grandparents, the town elders, it soon becomes apparent no time has passed at all.

Darkenbloom, with its medieval architecture and traditional pride, emerges as a town of dark secrets with little desire to uncover them. “They were silencings,” one elderly resident tells her young nephew, referring to incidents that happened after the war. There is only one Jewish resident today; passing references make clear this was not always the case. What is clear is that many prefer the status quo as it is now.

“He remembered the rumours like a red label on a box, the contents of which he no longer knew anything about,” thinks Flocke’s father, who was just a child back then. But others do remember. Indeed, some of those lauded for the way they helped shape what Darkenbloom became were anything but bystanders.

Slowly we piece events together. There was an incident, during the war; a devastating fire at the castle; then more horrors when the Russians came, and a series of cover ups later on. Women, in particular, suffered badly. Everyone seems to know something, but very few are willing to remember everything. A stranger takes up residence in the town hotel; meanwhile some out-of-towner students start clearing derelict Jewish graves, and the Hungarian border inches open for the first time in decades. And then a body is unearthed in a field.

At its heart, Darkenbloom is a thriller, albeit one more complex than an average whodunnit and with less interest in neatly tying up loose ends. Menasse crafts the story like an oil painting, with tiny anecdotes taking on greater significance hundreds of pages on until eventually the canvas in its entirety is revealed. With so many characters, and so much to remember, it’s a book to read closely, and quickly.

Yet Menasse has not only written a compelling mystery but a social novel that serves as an occasionally withering satire of the provincial Darkenbloomers and their pretensions. There is the town drunk, the bombastic hotel landlady, the closeted travel agent and the disgruntled winemakers. There is a kerfuffle involving the water company that all have views on (and I can’t confess to have cared much about). Yes, Menasse fills into the blanks to explain why certain characters are as they are, and uses their foibles to advance the action. But it’s jarring; with such a serious subject, I felt the caricatures got in the way.

There’s much to unpick in this novel, which I didn’t love, but which I couldn’t put down by the end and can’t stop thinking about days later. Books about the Holocaust are commonplace, and justifiably so. Books about what followed are far scarcer, and there are holes in my knowledge that this book left me keen to fill. Above all, Menasse brings home the fact that while war may have ended in 1945, the scars of that era lasted for many, many more years.