Customer Reviews

The Rules of Perspective: A Novel

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The book opens in April 1945, just before the end of the war, with the art museum in the little town of Lohenfelde being bombarded by American artillery and finally receiving a direct hit from an American phosphorus shell and catching fire. Sheltering in the vault were four members of the museum's staff, whose corpses are found by an American patrol led by a young corporal, Neal Parry, who had taken an art course back in the States and had designed advertisement for cigarettes and such like.

After this opening, the chapters more or less alternate between, on the one hand, going back to the last few hours when the staff were still alive in the shelter and, on the other, going forward from the moment when Parry had found the corpses. The horrors of war, powerfully described by the author, are ever present in both parts. The rumble of guns, sometimes distant, sometimes near, is ever in the background; crumbling masonry has filled the air with dust, debris and smoke; objects and torn limbs have been flung about into the weird juxtapositions of Dada paintings.

The reader knows, when he reads the conversations in the shelter, of the characters' impending doom. They themselves are of course fearful; their talk is fitful and at times inconsequential, but suppressed tensions between the four come to the surface, as do suppressed secrets. They all have patriotic and dutiful feelings; the two women spout Nazi sentiments about Jews and Bolsheviks; the two men are more reserved in this respect.

The book asks us to think about what works of art can mean to some people in the midst of the ugliness and destruction of war.

The central German character is Herr Hoffer, the Acting Director of the museum. He loves the Germannness of German art, but he grieves for how much of its modern expressions had been declared degenerate, while other fine paintings had simply been removed by high-up Nazis for their offices or homes. (One SS man, an art lover who is obsessed by one painting in particular, plays an important role in the story.) Other pictures had been stored for safety in a salt mine for the duration of the war. Hoffer had managed to save from this deportation only a few of his most beloved paintings by hiding them in the Museum's vaults.

One of these was a small German landscape which Parry finds in the ruins and "appropriates". Parry's aesthetic feelings about art are not reflected in the coarse language in which he thinks and expresses himself (and which contrasts also with the formal language of the four Germans and also with Thorpe's often beautiful prose). But then most of his thoughts are not about art anyway, but about his army experiences, about all the devastation and all those "deads" he has seen, about his life back home, about his ancestors, about sex past and present.

At the end of most of the chapters there are a few enigmatic lines in italics. I was quite glad to have read a "spoiler" on the Amazon website which explains where they come from. We can perhaps guess it towards the end, when they add a further dimension to the story - though even when (on the last page) we know whose voice they are and re-read them, they remain rather obscure.

The book has its longueurs in the middle; but each of the two stories comes to a tense and dramatic end.

Thorpe has created a timely novel, not just because its events take place around VE Day, but because it is also a book about art and its uses. In painting, as in war, perspective is everything; reliant on subjective interpretation, art can easily be bent to fit an ideology.

For Herr Hoffer, art has replaced religion as a means of salvation; for the Nazis it is either useful or dangerous and to be handled without sentiment.

The reader's perspective is the only one that encompasses all the facts and can see both back and forwards, reinforcing the futility of hope and anxiety in the characters' actions as they pit their shredded dignity against the indifference of war. The reader possesses the unavoidable certainty of death; the novel's skill is the poignancy with which the characters, surrounded by horrors, resolutely anticipate their futures in a world after the war, as if they are immune.

Herr Hoffer (the honorific is always used, its formality emphasising his fussy, Pooterish nature) is dead from the beginning. Parry's patrol finds his charred corpse in the museum's vaults as they enter the town on 3 April 1945. Amid the rubble, Parry also finds a small oil painting, miraculously undamaged, which he secretly cuts from its frame and hides in his map pack, believing it to be a valuable original.

The second strand of the narrative then picks up the events leading up to Hoffer's incineration in the vaults, specifically the National Socialists' involvement with the gallery and its treasures over the previous decade.

This is by far the richer storyline, and it is here that Thorpe's extensive research subtly saturates the story without sounding intrusive, taking in the history of 'degenerate art', the principles of Modernism and the extent to which fear, coercion and wilful blindness worked on ordinary, educated Germans to bind them to the Nazi cause.

Hoffer is revealed as a coward who, motivated wholly by the desire to save himself and his family, has bribed the SS in order to avoid the draft,which he then justifies as his duty to the museum. Yet he is essentially a kindly, worried, well-meaning man whose one great love, aside from his own comfort, is the paintings in his care. These include many of the 20th-century works confiscated by the Nazis, and he has taken a great risk by falsifying the museum's inventory and hiding some of these 'degenerate' works (including his personal favourite, a Van Gogh) in the vaults.

While Hoffer's story encompasses years of history and presents meaty arguments about Modernism, Romanticism and aesthetics, Parry's share is altogether more disappointing. This is largely because Thorpe has created the two storylines in the free indirect style, telling Parry's story in a kind of Thirties American slang that has the effect of making him sound as if he's in a Broadway musical. Women are 'dames', everything is prefaced with 'helluva' or 'goddamn'; these and other stock Americanisms infect the whole prose until it comes to sound like someone putting on a bad accent, and robs Parry of psychological realism.

There is a third strand to the narrative, too: unexplained fragments from the diary of a Jewish girl, who turns out to have been hiding in the museum's attics, a fact only revealed at the end. Who she was, how she came to be there, what effect her presence had on the person hiding her - none of this is touched upon.

Her voice may be intended to add a further perspective to this picture of war (the fate of the Jews remains largely outside the novel's remit), but it adds little and complicates an already unevenly weighted structure - a curious fault for a novel containing so much discussion of aesthetic form.

A small German town is being overrun by US forces in WWII. There are two parallel stories, that of the director of the local art museum, and of a US squad leader, who is a commercial artist and would be fine artist. Interestingly, the action involving the squad leader occurs several hours after the action involving the director, although the two stories are related and interwoven. The squad leader's story is not very good; fortunately, it is the smaller part of the novel, which includes the art director's reflections on past events. The art director is well intentioned, and if he is not very brave, he has taken chances in behalf of the integrity of the museum's collection. While he dislikes the Nazis, that cannot be said for all his employees or his wife, but they are all treated with understanding. The novel is very competently written, and the historical dimension adds a lot. Still, something is missing. It takes a special talent to get the reader involved when there is little suspense, and the characters are rather pedestrian, trying to live simple lives with modest ambitions and not much emotion, and Thorpe does not fully succeed. I noticed I was always more interested when the action involved a secondary character, an highly intelligent, ambitious, art loving Nazi official.