Two men meet after the passage of forty-one years. The old General, Henrik, awaits the arrival of his childhood friend and constant companion, Konrad. All the details of their meeting and meal together are arranged to duplicate the setting as it was the last time they dined together at the General's family estate - a castle situated in the forested hills on the eastern edge of the great Hungarian plain. At that meal they were joined by the General's wife, Krisztina. Earlier in the day, at the break of dawn, there had been a hunt in the large forest that belongs to the estate. Something happened -- or might have happened, it is not clear; the only evidence is the General's strong intuition that it did in fact happen -- during the hunt that resulted in Konrad's departure until the evening. On the next day he makes an even greater departure, resigning his military commission abruptly and leaving his apartment, his homeland, and the only true friends he has ever had in his life. The mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved for all except Henrik and Krisztina. The consequences of that day reverberate for the remainder of their lives.
As Henrik understands it Konrad and Krisztina had become lovers, and on that day Konrad had intended to kill his friend during the hunt. The right moment came and then vanished. Despite his intense hatred of Henrik, Konrad had lowered his rifle at the last instant. All of this has been reconstructed by the General, who did not at first understand the depths of that hatred or the reasons for it (which preceded the affair and may have been growing for years). The reasons were simple and straightforward and became clear to him with the passage of time (the reader can also infer them retrospectively, based on the narrative of their shared youth, to which the first quarter of the book is devoted). Konrad and Henrik were classmates from the age of ten in a Viennese military academy, then professional comrades in the peacetime Imperial Army. While everything in life came easily to Henrik, a man of open, sunny disposition in his youth, and more importantly, a man of inherited wealth and position who is implicitly trusted by everyone whose path crosses his, Konrad is a social outsider, born to an increasingly impoverished Galician couple who sacrifice every last pleasure and penny to pay for his education and the necessary accoutrements of a man of his station in life. He accepts nothing from his friend's family, other than being their constant guest, since Henrik cannot bear to part with his companionship. He is doubly an outsider in the army due to his artistic inclinations and talents as a musician (which creates a sympathetic resonance between Konrad and, first, Henrik's mother, then his wife). This uneasy bond continues for twenty-some years, until the evening of the final meal. The contrast in fates, social acceptance, and prospects has become unsupportable to Konrad. And yet he does nothing, other than flee the entanglement, going as far as to become an English citizen and further removing himself by working for decades in a colonial enterprise in the tropics of southern Asia.
From the day after the hunt, when Henrik seeks Konrad and instead finds Krisztina in his friend's abandoned apartment, he never speaks to his wife again, moving into the family hunting lodge while his wife remains ensconced in the castle. Neither one ever summons the other. She dies after eight years of this strictly enforced separation. Henrik remains in the army, serving in the First World War and then retiring to his room in the castle to ponder matters in solitude for the next twenty-two years. He knows that someday Konrad will return so that they will have the necessary discussion which constitutes most of the novel. Like a hunter setting a trap for his prey, he has prepared the discussion in great detail, circling around the two questions which he wishes Konrad to answer. His conversation, full of excursions into the findings of his solitary meditations - the nature of hunting as a ritual of sacrifice, the consideration of private and public murder (war), the inviolability of true friendship, the lack of self-understanding of men suffering from arrogance as well as ignorance -- is something of a philosophical treatise, undertaken as an exercise in both revenge and self-knowledge. In fact, if he can bring Konrad to agreement on the key issue of self-knowledge, he will have accomplished his revenge, which is entirely psychological - even spiritual -- in conception.
The two questions he wishes answered are not the obvious ones which suggest themselves: Did Konrad intend to kill him? And were Konrad and Krisztina lovers? (Remember, since that day no one in the triangle has communicated with the other two, much less admitted to any particular act of betrayal.) But, as Henrik realizes, each person's life and death has given the answers to those questions, which are the mere facts of an imaginary police report and therefore banal and predictable. He poses two other questions, which I will not share here. The answer to one of them can satisfy him while shaming his friend, but might bury the last shred of his love for his deceased wife. The answer to the other can only shame them both while exalting the same woman.
This is a philosophical novel which addresses many of the unsettling mental phenomena that accompany the self-knowledge attainable only by a withdrawal from the active world that accompanies old age. The time frame and social frame (which, as Henrik notes, was partially destroyed by the first war and promises to be totally destroyed by the second war in progress) are given as facts, but have broader cultural implications. The fatal day was July 2, 1899, and the meeting takes place on August 14, 1940. Henrik and Konrad were born in 1865; therefore they belong to the generations of the author's parents and grandparents and represent a disappearing way of life and thought. In a way this novel is also an early step that Marai was taking in the direction of a final valediction to the country he loved but came to find intolerable, the beginning of a slow flame which itself would end in dying embers.
(The following remarks are parenthetical, as they do not deal directly with an appreciation of the novel. I believe - and I am only guessing here - that a portion of "Embers" has enjoyed a second life in film, specifically in the portrayal of the young Alfred Redl and his friend, the aristocratic Kristof Kubinyi, in Istvan Szabo's film "Colonel Redl" (released in 1984). Although the credits of this film cite John Osborne's play "A Patriot for Me" as a textual source, you will find nothing in that play which reflects on the strong childhood relationship between these two characters in the film (in fact, the play has no Kubinyi and no scenes from Redl's youth). As usual Szabo has taken great biographical and narrative liberties with the actual Redl's life in order to shape his drama, which, like his films "Mephisto" and "Hanussen", examines the underlying theme of betrayal. In fact in each of these films there is layer upon layer of betrayal, starting with the self and radiating out to friends and nation. In "Colonel Redl" the main features of the bond between Redl and Kubinyi -- its establishment when they were young cadets, its intensity, the contrast between the "second family" and the family of birth, the comparative social backgrounds and prospects of each partner, and the trajectory of the friendship -- are so close to the characterization of the bond between Henrik and Konrad during their shared childhood and youth that it would seem to be beyond coincidence (other details point in this direction, e.g., the real Redl was born in 1864, the fictional Henrik and Konrad in 1865). It's hard to believe that Szabo didn't know this novel by his prominent countryman and use it in his own fashion (I don't know if he has spoken or written about this; my remarks may be redundant of something on the record unknown to me). In his typical fashion Szabo has mixed the psychological characteristics of the two members of each bond (Henrik/Konrad-Kubinyi/Redl) to suit his own purposes. (E.g., Redl, unlike Konrad but like Henrik, is the "real soldier" with a strong emotional attachment to the Imperial Army and Habsburg society which he betrays; but in "Embers" such a betrayal would be impossible for Henrik. Henrik, a Hungarian aristocrat like Kubinyi, is a far more serious man who is capable of introspection and withdrawal from society, while Kubinyi has neither of these gifts. And so on.) And of course the same "onion" of betrayal lies at the heart of Marai's story. Perhaps my speculation here is idle and unprovable, but, having seen the film several times since its release, I was immediately stuck by the strong resemblance between the film's and the novel's depiction of this bond when I read "Embers".)
The Knopf edition, like its edition of this novel's sibling, "The Rebels", is handsome and compact. The translation by Carol Brown Janeway gives a fair sample of Marai's clean and powerful language, which, although this is apparently self-contradictory, supports Henrik's belief that some very important things in and about our lives are known and yet remain beyond the power of language to express. This is the third of Marai's novels recently "resurrected" for publication in English translation, and it should inspire further undertakings which will bring his work a deserved contemporary readership at home and abroad.
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