For much of the past 15 years, Steven Carroll’s considerable novelistic gifts have been consumed with the production of his, which reimagines the interior and exterior lives of T.S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne, a process that produced not just some of the most remarkable writing of his career, but also won him the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction. Carroll writes the non-fiction column in this masthead every other week.
, but is simultaneously a very different creature. While the Eliot novels explored the intersection of life and art, and the sensibilities of Eliot and those around him,is, as the title suggests, a riff on the novels of the golden age of detective fiction .The novel begins in autumn 1947 in Cambridge, when German philosopher Martin Friedrich is mowed down at an intersection by a speeding car.
But as Minter delves deeper, he uncovers a more complex web of pain and grief around Friedrich. First there is Daisy, the young woman with whom the middle-aged philosopher was having an affair, recently dead as a result of a botched abortion. Then there is Friedrich’s former lover, Anna. Also German, Anna is now a lecturer at one of the colleges, and while admiring of Friedrich’s mind and work, is considerably less so of him as a human being.
Friedrich owes more than a little to Martin Heidegger: like Heidegger, he is a former member of the Nazi Party whose work explores questions of being and meaning, themselves deeply literary preoccupations. Pinkie’s name is borrowed from the troubling young thug in Greene’s; at one point Minter confuses his reality and the book, and wonders whether perhaps he and Pinkie have already met.
The result is a novel of remarkable poise, which marries its weighty concerns and deeply felt sensibility to a playful delight in the very real pleasures of the genre it so deftly inhabits.
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