This excessively long epic of war and love is almost impossible to review with charity, yet charitable criticism must be included in any assessment of it because the author is ambitious, has done prodigious research, and has certain remarkable talents. Julie Orringer is a young American whose first book, the much-praised collection of short stories How to Breathe Underwater, was noted for its ironic humour and verbal precision. Such attributes have been entirely discarded in this, her first novel, in which she takes a great story – in part based on the experiences of her grandparents – and flattens it beneath a mountain of incident and often embarrassing prose.
Andras Lévi is a poor young Hungarian who goes to Paris in 1937 to study architecture, while his elder brother Tibor goes to Modena to study medicine; in their native land, quotas for Jewish students prevent such education. Andras and Tibor have a younger brother, Mátyás, who aspires to the stage, as well as unassuming parents in the Hungarian village of Konyár; their story expands to include the fates of the Jewish fellow students Andras meets at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris.
Andras is only 19. He meets an older, mysterious ballet teacher, Klara Morgenstern, and falls tumultuously in love. Their passionate relationship constitutes the first part of the saga and the destinies of Klara's family in both Paris and Budapest join that of Andras's in the complex narrative. Orringer is to be praised for her capacity to recreate the atmosphere of Paris in the febrile year which preceded the Munich pact, during which French antisemitism was on the rise. Her mastery of historical detail is admirable, as is her microscopic consideration of every visual feature of Andras's surroundings. The colour of every object – from "sandwiches so pale they looked like snow", through the varying shades of white, grey or silver in ice, beards or hay, to the "dusty yellow light" of a staircase – is painstakingly recorded.
But her lack of control over this descriptive torrent makes it impossible for her characters to come to life. Cardboard creatures, they drown in a sea of florid language, while their emotions and their dialogue – never for one moment containing any of the banter which is so much a part of most human life – are decorated with every available cliché. Clara looks up "from under the graceful arch of her brows". Always a dozen adjectives are used when one – or none – would do, as when Tibor and Andras visit the Louvre, "taking in the velvet-brown shadows of Rembrandt and the frivolous curlicues of Fragonard and the muscular curves of the classical marbles". As every sensation, every meal, doorway and incidental character receives similar attention, the narrative suffers and becomes infected: "That was what made her like a nymph, Andras thought; the way she seemed to embody both timelessness and the irrevocable passage of time."
And yet, a skeleton of brilliant storytelling can be spotted, and it almost comes to life in the second part of the book, which uses the experiences of these two Hungarian-Jewish families to tell the story of the Hungarian Holocaust. As war approaches, Andras's visa renewal is refused. Forced to return to Budapest, with the outbreak of war he is conscripted into the Munkaszolgalat, the state labour service which by 1938 consisted only of Jewish Hungarians. The horrific labour camps of the second world war, in which millions died, have always received less notice than the Nazi death camps. Death in these labour services was gradual, always wretched, and usually agonising. Here Orringer's grasp of fact and circumstance is used to best effect, as she observes the lingering disintegration of each starving and diseased human body and recreates the minute attention devoted to ensuring that so many died with as much suffering as possible.
Her formidable aptitude for research also triumphs in her account of the fate of Hungary's Jews. Protected from Nazi deportation orders by the Hungarian state until March 1944, in the few months that followed before the final defeat of Hitler more than half the Hungarian-Jewish population was deported to death. This will always be a heartbreaking story, and Orringer tells it well.
She can master anguish and history, but her style rarely matches her subject. Whenever her characters re-enter the story, purple prose accompanies them. "Andras had thought of Klara's womb, that sacred inward space they'd taken pains to keep empty." And, later: "Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb." Nor is this helped by Orringer's insistent use of American idiom, as the text swells with "gottens", each sounding out of place on the desperate tongues of hounded European Jews in the 1930s and 40s.
Certainly Orringer has the talent to write. Has some sinister creative writing course twisted her obvious ability and deafened her ears? Only another cliché can truthfully describe her heroic failure in The Invisible Bridge: it is a perfect curate's egg of a book. That egg was famously good in parts. But of course an egg cannot manage this; such an egg cannot be eaten at all.
Carmen Callil's Bad Faith is published by Vintage.
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