THE FINAL SOLUTION: A Story of Detection
By Michael Chabon
Fourth Estate, £10; 131pp
ISBN 0 060 76340 X
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It seems strange to think of someone writing a pleasant novel about the Holocaust, but this is what Jenna Blum has done. The jacket biography of Blum’s first novel, Those Who Save Us, reveals that she is “of German and Jewish descent” and that she “worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors”.

Blum bestows both German Jewish descent and the experience of interviewing people about their memories of war on her fictional heroine, Trudy Swenson. Trudy is a middle-aged professor of German history, separated from her husband; an only child whose recently widowed mother, Anna, has moved into a nursing home. Clearing her mother’s abandoned house, Trudy makes a disturbing discovery: a gold case, etched with a swastika, containing a photograph of Trudy as a toddler, perched on her mother ’s lap. Standing behind them, as though in a family group, is an SS officer in uniform, his features obscured by a uniform cap. Trudy has always known that her mother’s American husband, Jack, was not her father, but she has no idea who her real father was. Is she the daughter of the SS officer?

The structure of Blum’s novel, which cuts back and forth between Trudy’s life in 1990s Minneapolis and her mother’s experiences as a very young woman in wartime Weimar, ensures that we, the readers, are better informed about Trudy’s past than she is herself. We know, as Trudy does not, that as she begins co-ordinating a project to interview non-Jewish German survivors of the war years about their experiences, she is delving into the territory of her mother’s past.

Anna, as a young Aryan woman, conceived the child of a Jewish doctor who was soon arrested, and spent the rest of the war struggling to stay alive with her daughter, grappling with physical privation and the fear of discovery, as well as the intractable moral questions posed by the mere act of survival in such circumstances.

Trudy, meanwhile, is struggling with her own moral dilemma. The more difficult the attitudes she uncovers in her interviewees — and they range from complacent to vile — the harder she finds it to endure what she believes to be the truth of her own parentage. Her dilemma becomes particularly painful when she falls in love with one of her interviewees, a German Jew called Rainer with harrowing wartime memories.

Eventually, a chance meeting in the course of Trudy’s study project provides the means for her own present and her mother’s past to converge in what is, if not quite a happy ending, at least a reconciliation of a kind. Blum’s writing is exceptionally readable.

If Those Who Save Us is an exercise in half-tones and reticence, Michael Chabon’s novella, The Final Solution, is pure Grand Guignol — a romping, grandiose exercise in pastiche, set in the English countryside during the Second World War, but executed in an orotund style that harks back to the detective fictions of the 19th century. Chabon’s cast is composed entirely of exotics: a mute Jewish refugee boy whose constant companion is a talking parrot, a Church of England vicar, Mr Panicker, who is described as “a Malayee from Kerala, black as a boot-heel” and his wife, “a large, plain, flaxen-aired Oxfordshirewoman”, their ne’er-do-well son, Reggie, assorted lodgers, a policeman, ex-army officers and so on.

In short order, the parrot goes missing, one of the lodgers is murdered, and the whole mystery is solved, in 127 pages flat, by an ancient apiculturist with a distinguished past in cracking conundrums. If you like your adjectives flamboyant, your prose mannered and your plots improbable, The Final Solution is for you.

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