Review: Caging Skies

Caging Skies by Christine Leunens (John Murray, £14.99) offers a strange slant on the horrors of Nazism. It begins in 1938 in a Vienna already fired by the Führer’s expansionism and on the brink of Germany’s unification with Austria — the infamous Anschluss.

Like much in this account, a single detail brings the freneticism of those days to life — the narrator’s grandmother is taken on a stretcher to vote in the referendum held to legitimise this calamitous union.

The story is told by Johannes Betzler, a child who develops over the following years from a nervous recruit in the Hitler youth into a still-committed but disillusioned adherent of the new double Reich. His parents shelter a fugitive Jewish girl in their large house without telling their indoctrinated Nazi son.

Only when he is horribly disfigured in a bombing raid and his brave Resistance parents disappear, does he bring himself to continue the sheltering of the girl, a friend, it turns out, of his sister who has died at the age of 12 from diabetes.

Although the author’s well-researched background to events can enhance the narrative, too often it is clunky. While Johannes’s discovery of Kristallnacht in Berlin — from “the wireless” — is simply and clearly expressed, by contrast, Leunens elsewhere explores, over several pages of text, the nature of lies and truth by piling on exhaustive metaphors.

An unreliable narrator is a fashionable device in fiction and can unexpectedly reveal a convincing reality. Even Robinson Crusoe develops as an individual as he describes his privations and adventure. But when the storyteller is as flawed and venal as Johannes, the sadistic, brainwashed protagonist of this story, the device strains credibility.

No reader can have much sympathy for this appalling, self-indulgent, cruel liar. And it is hard to believe the son of such principled people could turn into such a vile ideologue — at least from this author’s rendition; possibly someone else could convince.

The depravity of Nazi Germany’s descent into industrial genocide hardly needs embellishment. Yet Leunens extends the horror beyond the defeat of the Axis nations. Johannes tells his captive that the war is not lost and the novel turns into a unpleasant version of The Collector or the grotesque reality of a Fred West imprisoning a young woman for sexual gratification — a device empty of meaning and gratingly gratuitous.

Caging Skies was acclaimed by Le Monde as “a beautiful novel”,  which goes to show how opinions differ.