What if your mother resembled Melanie Phillips and your sister were possessed by a demon? This is the question Toby Lloyd’s intriguing but infuriatingly flawed debut novel tries to answer – via the Holocaust, Oxford University, and a north London family drama.
The Rosenthals are an intellectual and argumentative bunch, who attempt to “mingle Orthodox tradition with a bourgeois appreciation of les beaux arts”. This book opens in perhaps overwhelmingly Jewish fashion with their Zeide, Yosef, on his deathbed, holding his concentration camp tattoo aloft and intoning the importance of god and family to his grandson Tovyah.
The ensuing narrative jumps between episodes of the Rosenthals’ lives (the courtship of parents Eric and Hannah, precocious Tovyah’s first year at Oxford, daughter Elsie’s troubled teenage years), different narrators (sometimes omniscient, sometimes Tovyah’s university friend Kate), and varying textual sources. At one point, Lloyd writes winkingly: “There are no reliable narrators in this house.”
All this postmodern invention can be interesting, but sometimes leaves the reader at a remove from the action. When we hear Yosef’s Shoah account, it is via Hannah’s interview with him for a book, and the narrative is broken up with clunky inserts such as “he explained”.
