Previously a journalist, Magee demonstrates her literary credentials from the first page.
What impressed me most was her gift for understatement. She writes some of the most subtle but malevolent dialogue I've read. And the scope for malevolence is vast, given her subject matter centres around a young couple in Nazi Germany. While the wife conforms to the regime in Berlin and, for a while, profits from it, her husband is subjected to years of suffering during the Nazi campaign in Russia and then in a POW camp.
Their meeting is unique and makes an interesting premise for the story. German soldier Peter Faber is fed up with the conditions in Russia and wants leave to go home. Deciding to marry so he can get honeymoon leave, he picks a bride from a catalogue, a woman he has never met. His choice, Katherine Spinell, wants the security of a war pension should her husband die in action.
Expecting it to be nothing more than a marriage of convenience, they are both taken aback by their mutual attraction and develop a lasting bond that keeps them going through the years of deprivation to follow. Their brief union before Peter's return to the front also produces a son, which only intensifies Peter's will to survive during years of appalling conditions while fighting in Russia and then interned in a prison camp.
Katherine remains in Berlin raising their son and living with her parents. Her father is a particularly ardent Nazi supporter and the family is for some years protected and well-fed as a result, but there is, of course, a cost.
Both Peter and Katherine are highly susceptible to Nazi propaganda. Magee signals their willing collaboration with the regime with acts of casual cruelty and a mutual inability to empathise with anyone else's plight bar their own. However, their gradual loss of innocence is a master stroke of storytelling, as each is eventually forced to acknowledge the callous treatment doled out by their social and military superiors and the heinous suffering it has caused.
Magee is seldom explicit, but you are left in no doubt as to the grotesque injustices, mass murder and victimisation that went on in Germany and Russia during World War 2. Caught in that deadly net were not just the enemies of the German state, but many of its soldiers and ordinary German families.
I found the ending a bit hard to take, but only because it didn't deliver what I wanted. However, when I thought about it, anything else would have been inconsistent with what Magee had so eloquently spelt out from the beginning. It wasn't a fairy story, but it was beautifully told, nonetheless.
- Caroline Hunter is an ODT subeditor.
