The Pages by Hugo Hamilton review – if a book could talk
over 4 years in The guardian
The narrator of this ingenious fable about Germany, nationalism and the tides of history is a century-old Joseph Roth novel
The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, best remembered for his masterpiece Radetzky March, anticipates several of its themes in his third novel, Rebellion, first published in 1924. It tells the story of Andreas Pum, a survivor of the first world war who has “lost a leg and been given a medal”. The book is at once grainily realistic and a kind of parable, and shows how an initially accepting spirit is turned towards fury by disappointment. Pum clings to life only “in order to rebel: against the world, against authorities, against the government, against God”.
For his 10th novel, Hugo Hamilton, the son of a German mother and an Irish father, has seized on Rebellion as a way of developing Roth’s preoccupations with the heartlessness of state politics while deepening his own commitment to writing about nationalism and identity. He uses the adventurous device of employing a copy of the first edition as his narrator. “I came to life,” it tells the reader, “between the wars ... Between what was first thought to be the fields of honour and later became the fields of shame.” The Pages is a peculiar sort of audio book, ingeniously sympathetic to its inspiration. Continue reading...
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