In his novel The World According to Garp, John Irving wrote about a father warning his young son to be careful about the undertow at the beach. The son misheard, and from then on imagined that lurking beneath the water was a monster called the Undertoad, quick to cause him nightmares. As he grew up, the Undertoad came to mean an unidentifiable dread lurking offshore in the mind, a sense of foreboding that something bad was happening or about to happen. In Heinrich Boll's book Billiards At Half Past Nine, the Undertoad is omnipresent. The novel takes place in Germany, both post and pre-war, and is a kaleidoscopic view of three generations of the Faehmel family: Heinrich the 80 year old patriarch, Robert, his son, and Joseph, the grandson...all architects. By kaleidoscopic, I mean that though the action takes place in the course of a single day, Boll uses different narrators in 13 chapters and jumps randomly through more than 50 years, making the overall structure a fractured view that is ever shifting. It is often difficult to know who is talking, when, and about what, and like a mosaic, the whole picture is revealed only slowly and from a distance. This is the novel's genius, and what sets it apart.
There are some pervasive themes (time, food, ballgames), and phrases which turn up again and again: "how weary, weary these old bones." "whywhywhy", "the Buffalo Sacrament", "the Lamb." They are obtuse, but critical to an understanding of the story, and though perhaps obvious to German readers in the 1950s, they are certainly not to a foreigner today. Given the somewhat confusing nature of the novel, upon finishing it I immediately went to read some analyses online which helped. The first reference about the bones becomes clear when you get the phrase in German (Es zittern die morsche Knochen). It transpires that this is the first phrase of the number two song on the hit list of Nazi marching songs, after the Horst Wessel Lied, the SS anthem. A search on YouTube leads to you a warning that this is inappropriate, and after ticking a disclaimer (and thus no doubt immediately flagging myself as a Neo-Nazi to the Powers that Be), you see why this is such an evocative reference. To the German reader post-war, this reference would immediately bring up a vision of lines upon lines of soldiers marching and the tromp tromp tromp of jackbooted feet, blinded by their loyalty to the Fatherland. The last stanza of the song reads:
We will continue to march,
Even if everything shatters;
Freedom rose in Germany,
And tomorrow the world belongs to it .
The irony of these words resonates with every stamp.
The Buffalo Sacrament is also a reference to the Nazi Party and to the vision of Hindenberg, the Prussian General who was the symbol for bellicose nationalism, and the Lamb of pacifists and the Church. The Faehmel family, like everyone in Germany, was the bratwurst caught between two thick pumpernickel slices of theology of National Socialism and any of its Opponents, including portions of the co-opted Catholic Church, communists, and pacifists. The party and the war touched all. Robert, the main protagonist, was forced to leave Germany and spent the pre-War years in Holland, where he learned to play billiards. His friend Schrella, a pacifist, also escaped persecution and eventually came back. His mother Johanna was put in an insane asylum for harbouring refugees, shopped to the Nazis by Robert's brother Otto, who perished on the Eastern Front in 1942 a die-hard Nazi. This causes her to repeat "whywhywhy" as a demented person would, when in fact she is entirely lucid, and eventually plots revenge in the climax of the novel. Robert returns as a soldier and following the command of a twisted General, blows up the Abbey that his father designed, an act done at the same age (29) as his father was when he built it. His life becomes a pleasureless ritual of the same breakfast of cream cheese and paprika, and a session of billiards at a local hotel where he opens up to a young bellhop every day at 9:30 (thus giving birth to the name of the novel).
There is a semblance of reconciliation but no forgiveness amongst the characters, including the Nazi bully from Robert's and Schrella's youth who has done very well for himself. This moral ambiguity, that justice does not really exist, clouds everything. Even at the end there is no closing of the circle. This is partially what makes the novel so absorbing, and so chilling. What is true for the family is true for the nation.
The writing is dense but superb. There are so many quotable quotes that one's hand instinctively reaches for the highlighter. As with any great piece of literature, the novel effortlessly moves from the universal to the particular, with recurring themes of irony and guilt, both collective and individual. Like a vast mosaic, any of the bits can be savoured either alone or as parts of the masterwork.
If a man has his conscience removed there is not even a cynic left.
Boredom can only be filled with a new religion, and the more stupid a one, the better.
Irony is only a narcotic for the privileged.
You must add one thing yourself to what you have learned; a breath, just a breath of originality.
Politeness is the surest form of contempt.
There are two possibilities: either you know nothing, or you know everything.
Children see time as an eternity.
Careful when you climb the ladder.
The tree is contained in the nutshell.
You haven't grown happy on your victories.
I have had to swallow lack of tact by the jugful.
It isn't a picture; it's an anecdote, and it has the further disadvantage of being true.
Ephemeral things alone are (were) permanent.
Boll was part of a group of post-war writers dubbed the Trummerliteratur (arising from rubble). This novel is about the past, present, and future Germany (it was written in 1958). It is about creation, destruction, and reconstruction, and this refers not only to the physical but the psyche, a psyche which will forever be haunted by the Undertoad of the Past. It is not surprising that Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, but disturbing (and disappointing) that this book is not better known and is almost forgotten forty years on. Billiards At Half Past Nine is writing which can wake you up in the middle of the night and either make you nod your head, or shudder, but it will make you think.
Five out of Five
