Lies and truth in genocide fiction
On Charles Palliser’s 'Sufferance'
Say her diary isn’t enough—what else could you do with the memory of Anne Frank? I suppose you could ventriloquize her through artificial intelligence. Among the questionable Anne Frank bots is DeepAI’s. Ask it about her earlier co-option by a fellow famous teen, it answers, “I’ve been living in hiding with my family in Amsterdam since 1942, and I’m not aware of this ‘Bieber’ you speak of”. Conflate it with the UK’s drug helpline Talk to Frank and it advises “the effects of narcotics might be akin to the emotional rollercoaster I endured while in the Secret Annex.” The answers even come with a button to ‘humanize’ Anne Frank. (Maybe a deafness to irony isn’t the fatal tell of AI. Maybe it’s on a level of irony singularly above ours.)
That other détournements of her come from literature doesn’t guarantee they’re more tasteful. In The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth put Jewish upset at books like Goodbye, Columbus into the story of his alter-ego Zuckerman, who’s told his fiction “was worse than informing, that was collaborating”; far from cowed, Roth/Zuckerman comes back with a “fiction that of course would seem to them a desecration even more vile than the one they had read.” Namely the fantasy in The Ghost Writer that Anne Frank survived Belsen, emigrated to America under a new identity, grew into a beautiful, brilliant student (“the Pallas Athene of Athene College”) but, on learning her dad was alive and had published her diary, kept herself secret to preserve its impact, otherwise transferring her outsize love for “Dad-da” to an older male author while captivating a young one, Zuckerman, who fancies she’d make him a good shield against further upset. I mean how could his people stay mad if he married a nice Jewish girl—who’s also Anne Frank?
Charles Palliser wields her too for his latest novel, Sufferance, without the po-mo gimmickry of those AI waxworks. Yet neither is his novel any less inventive or subversive - or assertive of the rights of art - than Roth’s if more decorously than his wait-till-they-get-a-load-of-this approach.1 To the extent you might take Sufferance for one of those novels made for book-club debate, posing the question you get asked in museums to wartime resistance in the less-in-denial formerly occupied European countries (sometimes literally asked, by a sign over the exit): ‘What would you have done?’ Looked the other way, even collaborated to save yourself?—then how about your loved ones? Does your conviction you’d have joined the resistance survive all testimonies of torture? Or, inverting Nathan Englander’s famous short story whose Jewish characters wonder which of their friends would hide them from Nazis, do you hope you’d have been one of the brave to shelter your own Anne Frank?
But what if she wasn’t like the hardworking, honest, generous girl her diary unveiled too late to the world? Neither like the ‘Magical Jüden’ pop culture’s been graced with more recently by the likes of The Boy in the Striped PJs or Jojo Rabbit? What if, Sufferance dares ask, Anne Frank had been really annoying?
The central girl of Palliser’s novel - unnamed, thirteen, from a sarcastically branded “protected community” - so antagonises the family who shelter her during their country’s wartime collaboration with a racist Enemy that you might think her the novel’s antagonist. She shuns food prepared in accordance with her dietary restrictions or patched together from what the parents of the family can afford off their ration-books while going hungry themselves. At once more worldly and more childish than the family’s two unassuming daughters, she stirs their envy by boasting of her glam life with her own family - caught somewhere on the wrong side of the country’s annexation - then throws tantrums when they expose the boasts as plagiarised. As the regime foists ever crueller laws on the girl’s community and crushes those outside it caught harbouring them, she flouts the house rules on staying unheard and unseen to the endangerment of them all.
At this point you might suspect Palliser’s trick to writing her was to make her the anti-Anne Frank.2 Where Anne Frank feared that even to spot other Jews from the Secret Annex was to betray them, the girl in Sufferance is a snob to her co-religionists, impassive to any oppression other than what she feels. Her pseudo-foster sisters have “a sense of humour while [she] appeared to have none”, unlike Anne Frank, the class clown, who leavened her worries with dry wit (“Gandhi on one of his umpteenth hunger strikes,” she writes, then a few entries later, “Gandhi is eating again”). Then there’s the appeal of Anne Frank as a writer; among the evils of her and her fellow refugees’ deaths was the snuffing out of her talent. (Shutting her diary, you wonder what you were writing at thirteen. Fanfic?) The girl in Sufferance is multi-untalented.
If this makes the novel sound like it has one of those Banksily edgy or at least tone-deaf premises (‘In this book I ask: was Hitler autistic?’) or even that Palliser took a leaf from Roth’s provocatively profaning work, know that his subversion is grounded in a graver project for the novel. The antagonising girl is the first of three twists he’s given to an otherwise familiar subject that gives the novel its moral torque.
For he’s not profaned Anne Frank but - and here’s the real trick - done something more provocative: drawn his character from her. She, too, could be finicky with food, worried she was shallow compared to her nerdier older sister, had tantrums (that fierce aggravation adolescents feel for adults, trained in her case on stolid roommate Dussel whom she wants to punch in the face); showed ingratitude to the father of the house, her letter staking her independence from her parents being “the worst thing anyone ever wrote” him. She was never just the hardworking, honest, generous girl I described above, words that in any case were a self-description. As with Palliser’s girl, she too could be deemed:
showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating, etc., etc.
Handily for Palliser, she even hoped as she and house-mate Peter fell in love that he wouldn’t find her “insufferable”—so the insufferableness of the girl in the novel isn’t unprecedented. And being reminded Anne Frank was that precedent refreshes our perception of her. Beyond a symbol of hope in the dark reduced to an inspirational quote (“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”) lies no flawless saint. Why would there have done, even circumstances aside? In turn, to be reminded of that adds depth to the shallowness of the girl in Sufferance. For what she presents the family sheltering her is not an opportunity to foster a folk-hero but a problem: a problem child. By boiling down the personality of Anne Frank to get to his child’s, Palliser intensifies what it means to make sacrifices for another. Because when you take in a persecuted minority, you don’t get to try them out first, aren’t destined to click. Sufferance is not Paddington.
Palliser’s characterisation of the girl works only because of the second of his twists. Anne Frank’s sweet addresses to her diary (“Dear Kitty”), even the ones that admit she doesn’t love her mother or wishes her father loved her not as a daughter, maintain our sympathy, and that’s outside their inevitable, contextual pathos. It’s not unlikely, then, had the girl in Sufferance had the patience or self-awareness to keep a diary of her own, which Palliser made the novel’s point-of-view, she too would’ve roused sympathy even at her impossible worst. That’s the power and danger of the first person.
But Palliser gives the point-of-view not to a victim of ethnic persecution but neither, in that man-bites-dog way, to one of its perpetrators, as, among so many others, Jonathan Glazer did. Instead the narrator is the father of the family that ends up, decision by wary decision, sheltering the girl: a sort of Doubting Samaritan. We’re his fellow regarders of her, his fellow exasperatees. And so in this way Palliser can pull off his implicatory work on us.
To start with, he winds up our sympathy for the narrator’s point-of-view, not least on the girl, via the screw-tightening way he dramatises the man’s apprehension of her plight. As the novel unfolds, her community descends the levels of ethnic cleansing: the keeping from, the marking out, the dispossession, ghettoisation and, just off page, the mass murder. His ambivalence notwithstanding, he’s saving the girl from true horror. And this despite what else Palliser dramatises so grippingly: the trouble the narrator and his family get deeper in. The more he tries to reunite the girl with her own family, to work out whether the regime knows about her yet, the more its gaze turns on him—to see through him to her. And she a thirteen-year-old girl. Then that’s the pedantry of totalitarianism for you (and why you can sympathise with those who supernaturalise fascism: it’s dogged, just-because malice is like a demon’s).
Scouring for outside help, the narrator is sent into spirals of suspicion, caught as he is in that variation of The Prisoner’s Dilemma: how to secure a confidant in a time of informants. He can’t trust neighbours, colleagues, employees, even relatives, all of whom want to avoid disfavour at best and at worst curry favour from the new regime, chisel a few shitty advantages.3 Which regime further incentivises the most expedient behaviour. (Or did you think people’s expediency gets better under the weight of wartime?) And not even that’ll save you; the narrator sees black market profiteers dangling side by side with those who’d harboured ‘enemies’.
With those the stakes, he’s in a hellish bind. He puts his family and self in worse danger the longer he harbours the girl, who seems barely aware of the sacrifice let alone grateful for it except when scared it’ll stop, whose presence in their home saws at already frayed bonds, who’s so wayward that by the end she’s become a live grenade. The longer they keep her the more they incriminate themselves; but to turn the kid out now would be to set her among the wolves. No wonder when the narrator has to carry the girl he finds her “so light”. The bleakest irony renders the heaviest burden.
Is that burden the reason for the novel’s title? Does Palliser want us to take the word, with respect to The Merchant of Venice’s “sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”, in its older sense: of patiently endured suffering? And to widen Shylock’s ‘our’ from the exclusive to inclusive so as to cover all the sufferers in the novel? But the modern sense is the darker one and maybe more relevant. Doing something under sufferance means to begrudge it. There’s even a shade in it of allowing wrongdoing, like the way the narrator’s compatriots suffer the regime to brutalise their country. (Even he confesses he was glad at first for the stability they offered.)
I suspect Palliser means all these shades and more. Because his novel - not least from being a novel - is more thoroughgoing and exacting than a tragedy, of whichever sort, though it’s hardly short on fear and pity or clashing values that can’t be reconciled. As George Saunders put it in another context, the novel:
starts cornering itself, by asking a vital question that, though it needs to be answered, is being made more difficult to answer with every paragraph. We might say that [the] story’s relentless honesty eventually converts that question into a conundrum.
In this context, not the war museum’s ‘What would you have done?’ but ‘Why did they do what they did? And would you have been different to them?’
‘Them’ covering everybody. Scrupulously Palliser overdetermines every character, adulterates every action, ensures no judgement is truthless. The narrator’s wife, learning from her younger daughter about the stranded girl, is the first to ask her round for dinner; straight after, she tells her husband she found the girl “troubled”, something she can sense because of her own poor mental health, which festers with the girl’s subsequent swamping of their lives. By the end the narrator is shocked to hear his wife voice “ignorant prejudices” about the girl, though he himself finds her nervy obsessions with money to be “typical of her kind”, and though both are appalled by her and her kind’s maltreatment by new racial hygiene laws.
Youth is no defence against similar adulterations. Palliser, having frothed up Anne Frank’s flaws to put in the girl, skims off her merits to give to the family’s daughters: her passion and precociousness for the older one, her curiosity and kindness for the younger. It’s the younger one’s kindness to a girl who “wasn’t even in [her] class” that trips the ethical trap of the novel, yet the same daughter flips - after just that initial dinner - to panicked upset at her parents’ announcement they’re taking the girl in; the two schoolmates go on to share a room like cats. Even so the younger daughter is the last (like she was the first) to show the girl real kindness, soothing her through the hatch to the attic where they’ve had to secrete her from snitches and cops. Most troubling, though, is the older daughter, already at odds with her unwell mother and low-earning father, now stunted on the cusp of adulthood by wartime. She ends up flirting with fascism, literally, in the form of a fun young thug who lives downstairs, which flirting is used against her when he starts sniffing around their apartment and her parents tell her to “keep him at bay without offending him”—that is, put up with him if not put out to save them and the girl. These darkling predicaments grow like the shadow of a cloud over a city to cover all walks of life: the narrator’s opportunist bosses, the girl’s harsh servant, the apartment block’s concierge. Even she, a whiny extortionist and mother to the thug, has mixed-up motives. She too acts in fear of the cops.
But most darkling of all, and rightly so, is the girl herself.
Anne Frank got to write about herself; the girl in Sufferance is written about by the narrator. One whom Palliser makes a “book-keeper,” a “not fully certified accountant”, and for more than to limit the financial means the narrator will have available during his various trials but for the polysemy of the terms as well. Palliser’s been around the block and book enough not to be dazzled by the hoary idea of the unreliable narrator, that any exasperation from the reader with the girl must always be qualified since the one who keeps the book sets the point of view, since characters are annoying only according to others’ uncertified accounts. The girl isn’t a caricature by the narrator through which we’re meant to see the novelist’s character. Neither do I think Palliser wrote the girl as a symbol of any troubled and therefore troublesome minority group. Society’s sufferance of such groups is a form of scapegoating. The trouble the girl brings is very real.
Instead I think he was determined to plausibly make the girl at once a nightmare and a child. A calamity the narrator and family have brought on themselves, and a relationship dynamic that feeds off and back through theirs. Because they’re all, on some level, aware of those dynamics. The narrator and his wife know which cracks in their family the girl is widening: she guesses the girl’s glomming-on to her is a grasp for attention from someone who got little otherwise; he advises his daughters that her boasts come from a lonely attempt to juice her memories since that’s all she has left of her own family.
And what a family! She palms off a fancy make-up carousel on the younger daughter to use with her mother since her own never did with herself. Her father was such a gangsterish businessman that her community hate or fear him too much to help her; and any paternal influence he had was teaching her to act the coquette with men to coax their indulgence. And her older brother might’ve taken this to its most unconscionable level one drunken night, or so she implies through a story she leaves hanging. If she is a spoiled brat, who spoiled her?
The only tender relation she seems to have had was with a kid brother, his the fragment she keeps of a family photo otherwise torn to pieces during one of her tantrums. This boy-fragment is such a lacuna in the narrator’s perception of the girl that at one point he miscounts the number of people in her family. The same brother warrants her one clear virtue: she’s good with kids, so much so that she babysits for the narrator’s neighbours, till even that gets too risky.
She has her virtues then, her vices were learnt, and her pose of sophistication is a pose, one of her habits to cope. Plus in case we forget - which we might, so well has Palliser brought to life her crassness, her temper, the whispery way she bitches about the family in front of them to a priceless doll - she’s just a thirteen-year-old girl. Concealment sped up Anne Frank’s maturity, like a plant whose growth is forced by its privation; still, she had her parents with her and her sister and their friends. The friendless girl in Sufferance, reverted to a baby ball of rage by the end, lives with strangers and without family, as bad as they for the most part were. Family who’ve likely been imprisoned if not killed by the regime that’s looking, every day, to do the same to her. So cut her some slack, is that Palliser’s point? Or is it to ask: what’s the most just way to deal with impossible people in impossible situations? Or, considering the contradiction in that last sentence, is there none?
Isn’t there at least something basically admirable in such characters in such a situation taking risks and making sacrifices? At least in their sufferance, however we take the word? Not going by the story as Palliser tells it. He affords no easy space for us to put what we’d like to think of as righteousness or bravery or heroism.
The family’s heroism doesn’t start as such, or end for that matter. The younger daughter’s overture to the girl, the parents’ asking her round then taking her in aren’t brave interventions by those consciously making a stand. They’re ordinary acts of civic kindness, with little at stake: though the girl’s family left her in their mansion, a servant holds the fort there with her. But if the parable of the boiling frog has an inverse, it’s that kindness seeps in its own fatality. The deeper commitment the narrator makes to the girl, the harder it’ll become to dispose of it, till doing the right thing - by his own kids, let alone someone else’s - becomes a scrap to see which shames and fears will win out as opposed to anything noble.
Then there’s that devalued coin in an age of utilitarianism: motive. The narrator, most charmed by the girl at first - unlike his daughters she’s “deeply affectionate and demonstrative” (as her father trained her to be) - admits his mind was made to take her in when she thanked him for that first dinner with a kiss and whisper that “I wish you were my daddy”. He keeps letting her flatter him, to the extent his wife, maddened by the risks he’s taking, implies an unhealthy attachment. Whether or not his denial is credible, his vanity hasn’t helped. Since he didn’t admit to it at first, he’s left rationalising now. He explains his motive, against his family’s doubts, by insisting the girl’s father will pay them back for costs she incurs and perhaps give him a good job on returning. Even his rationalisations of his true motives don’t reach for the heroic… The opposite: having blamed an earlier spell of his wife’s mental unwellness for his modest professional standing, he floats this chance of a job to remind her of the part she played in that. (Careful what you rationalise for. The financial motive - one the girl starts accusing him of - becomes true by the time he’s having to scope out her mansion for money to use as bribes to protect his family and her.)
Rational self-interest out of greed or vanity a reader might get, if not get over. This narrator doesn’t even have the rationality of the ruthless. Before the girl has to be confined to the apartment, and after she pouts at pocket money he offers her - the same amount as for his daughters - he, incredibly, ups it in secret to a standard she’s used to, around 2.5% of his weekly wage, just to see the sun break out on her face. Well you can imagine the fallout.
Scorned daughters are one thing; brushes with the law and death are another. His decisions to harbour the girl, hide her identity, reunite her with her own people - murkily motivated as they are - might’ve remained heroic in a daffy away if the cost only fell on himself. But as the story pressurises, he becomes the unwitting pawn then coerced accomplice in the deaths of others. Does saving a life still save the world entire if it ends other lives? Or by definition must heroism cost?4 But what’s gruffly heroic in a father making tough decisions to protect those under his charge when he co-authored the need for those decisions? Regardless, the cost falls on his charges too. As the Enemy’s enemy closes in, he stops his wife and younger daughter from evacuating to the countryside with the excuse that they couldn’t support themselves there, but in truth because to let them go would mean to cop to the danger he’s put them in. Sufferance is not the most pictorial of novels—Palliser saves his fine-detailing for the knots and webs of his characters.
The knot they’re caught in by the end comprises the Sunk Costs Fallacy, desperate measures, and their recoils of pity at the brink of dereliction: a lose-lose-lose scenario. In leaving them no good options - however you define good - Palliser paints morality as irrational. Or a kind of curse: when one ploy to get the girl off their hands fails and the narrator comes back with her to the apartment, his wife opens the door, screams and slams it shut, as if the girl were a malicious sprite they’d tried to drown and who’s reappeared in a puddle on their doorstop.5 There’s nothing feel-good about morality in Sufferance. It doesn’t seem to please but goad God (you could rename the novel No Good Deed…); it doesn’t please anyone, there’s no social cachet to the characters’ acts: if their compatriots knew of them, they’d think them stupid at best and criminal at worst. There’d be no consolation in telling them they were on the right side of history; meanwhile our own assumptions of how we’d comport ourselves if tested by history are shown as having the benefit, the smugness of hindsight. Since we advance through Sufferance’s story forward (albeit told retrospectively), since we track the thinning branches of the narrator’s decisions step-by-step, page-by-page, to his wit’s end, we might feel instead some of that Kierkegaardian fear and trembling. For so devilishly has Palliser crafted his conundrum that it’s not so much that the reader feels stripped by it down to some secret amoral core (he’s no nihilist); rather that, as horrific as the story gets, we can’t confidently say which of the main characters were wrong. And only the dull or defensive among us will miss the irony when the narrator says, “others can make a judgement of my conduct as well as I can.” (This isn’t relativism by the way; more like moral skepticism.) We might even have to admit, as he does, to being “part of this horror”.
To make sense of the novel’s meticulous honesty, its Jamesian thoroughness with every branch of the characters’ motives and decisions, I don’t think we have to assume a moral impulse in Palliser to do the subject justice (though he may well have had one), as contradictory as that sounds. It’s better to think of it as the aesthetic in-road he found to the subject. The novel itself his answer to the question: in 2025 how do you get away with writing another novel about this?
Why’s that any question? Galen Strawson, in a review of W G Sebald’s Austerlitz for The Financial Times, put it best when he warned that “the history of the Jews in the second world war is a dangerously available source of intensity.” Myself, I call it temporal appropriation: taking this or that genocide or sectarian massacre from history and turning it into a plot-point or background for your artwork and - like that - giving it an air of worthiness: the middlebrow version of exploitation movies. How much more dangerous, then, when the artwork involves a young girl or boy? For every Fugitive Pieces there’s a Life is Beautiful.6
To some this danger lies not just in art about kids during the Holocaust but in any art about it, especially that made (as you often see glibly appended) “under capitalism”. Sebald himself, as relayed by Adam Thirlwell in his anatomy of the man’s gloomy kitsch, thought it obscene the extras in Schindler’s List might’ve drunk Coke between takes. (What should they’ve been allowed to drink?) For others like Ruth Franklin, in her book A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, there’s a lineage of, and role for, artists as well as documentarians in representing the Holocaust. She asks whether Elie Wiesel, for whom “a novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, it is a lie” wasn’t himself applying aesthetics when he rewrote his memoir The World Was Silent and retitled it as Night for an English-speaking readership. When Anne Frank heard on the wireless of the Dutch government-in-exile’s plans to gather survivor-testimony after the war, she started editing her diary in the hope of publication and day-dreamed about turning it into a novel, The Romance of the Secret Annex.7 Writers who did survive like Aharon Appelfeld didn’t stick to testimony or memoir; he refined his history of being a Jew in the second world war into artful novels like Age of Wonders and Badenheim 1939.
It’s all a matter of angle. Roth in The Ghost Writer went with insight through irreverence. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow went with irony, the “strictly moral irony” of telling a story about the Holocaust backwards, so that at every moment the reader had to flip the literal meaning to get to the implied. By making us figure out what was happening, Amis’s novel simultaneously dodged the risks of bad taste in presenting such material straight and had us do the all-the-more striking imaginary legwork ourselves. Palliser’s angle is different but driven by the same goal: to fly under the radar of our expectations the better to get under our skin; to grab the reader’s attention in a decent but artful - decent because artful - way.
That’s the third of his twists, alongside the novel’s caught-in-the-middle POV, and his over-determination of every character. Some Tales of the Unexpected are to do with the content; with others it’s the telling. The raison d’être of Sufferance, its self-justification as a novel is that it’s a formally inventive one, on the verge of an Oulipo experiment…
That Palliser cares about form, about the how of his novels as much as the what might not be apparent from a first flick-through of Sufferance. Its language is a hundred shades greyer than Amis’s, the tone a hundred decibels quieter than Roth’s. Corroboration can be found, however, in Palliser’s back catalogue of nobly motivated literary trickery.
His debut, 1989’s The Quincunx, was billed as a return to the 19th century novel, though more specifically it was a Dickensian one, except for the way it mixed, in the style of modern period dramas, the Victorian’s social breadth and storytelling with the saucier stuff writers could get away with in the 20th century. (This makes it more a postmodern pastiche of Dickens but you can see why marketing didn’t go with that label.) Anyway The Quincunx had people exclaim ‘Finally, a proper novel!’ like they’d praise a new piece of classical music for having a tune you could hum. Suffice to say it sold in the millions. Yet Palliser didn’t build on his bestsellerdom with a sequel in either content or form. With 1991’s The Sensationist he went from a 1000-page blockbuster to a near novella, from rich language to stark, and from the past to the modern-day and a set of very 20th century preoccupations: drugs, depression, meaningless sex. Neither a contrarian sucker-punch nor a Difficult Second Novel, more a good faith decision to avoid hackily rehashing his greatest hit, The Sensationist didn’t fly with fans of The Quincunx. Palliser remained unswayed. He kept chasing new formal, tonal spins on historical subjects (such as 2013’s Rustication, set again in the 19th century and about a smackhead child-molester).
You have to respect this tenacity bordering on career chutzpah. Truth be told, his career is a lesson in the shaky prospects for even a debut hit author, his novels having drawn a wide arc from Canongate, through to Ballantine, W. W. Norton, and now landing on the plucky small press Guernica World Editions for the publication of Sufferance, in, I’m sorry to say, a pretty crummy edition with peeling laminate, boss-eyed margins, and pages that when you turn them pop and crack fireplace-loud enough to wake anyone you might be sleeping next to. This does go to show Palliser’s artistic integrity. Not because artistic and commercial success pull in opposite directions, as the ressentiment of the failures in both would have you think. (Any writer who doesn’t want a success like The Quincunx is full of it.) But because the sign of a real artist is the nature of their primary motive. Whether or not their artwork finds the commercial success they hope for, have they located the formal problem of the work—and solved it?
Palliser’s solution is the same thing that might’ve had you think I’ve done a lacklustre job synopsising his novel. See I’ve not been flouting the conventions of book-review plot summary by failing to name characters. On no page does Palliser either. His constraint against naming is the third and smartest twist on his novel’s subject.
Nobody is named, from the main characters like the narrator and the girl, his wife and daughters, to the stressors in their story like the girl’s venal former staff, the narrator’s colleagues, his nosy concierge. Broadening from the specifics, the girl’s “protected community” never gets a name beyond that euphemism or ones like “those people” or “her race”. Meanwhile the euphemisers are only ever known as “the Enemy” during an unnamed War. One that takes place... somewhere: nowhere is named either, not the city or country in which the story is set or which country has occupied them. And no when is given either: never do we spot one of those familiar 19nn years with all their historical associations.
Is the reason for such a noticeably abstract style - I dunno what you’d call it, ‘ahistorical expressionism’? - to give Sufferance wider appeal and application? From Coelho to Coetzee an abstract style goes with the allegorical or fable-like; in the latter’s post-colonial novel we only ever read about “The Empire” and “The Barbarians” and so can apply those terms to various candidates or read them as universals. True, Palliser references yellow badges for the protected community but they could be a crescent as much as a star (or cross for that matter, like those Christian heretics had to wear). And it’s hard to see how a novel from the 21st century that keeps using the word “refugee” could stop us from thinking of those in the past decade fleeing North Africa and the Middle East. To a similar coordinate-scrambling end, Palliser has the narrator say the girl looks “characteristic of her people” but leaves what that looks like till p.162 when he finally gives a physical description, and one we might not expect. As for the Enemy, it might seem obvious they’re Nazis from a list of their victims - “Catholics, Romanies, Communist party members, ex-servicemen, prisoners of war” - but then later we read of them persecuting Protestants too. By not naming them Nazis or fascists, Palliser won’t let us morally discriminate so easily, with all the covert pandering that that entails. Besides, we don’t ever meet the Enemy or their collaborationist top-dogs; instead it’s neighbours, colleagues, the national police as opposed to a foreign secret one, auxiliaries from round the block rather than invading soldiers.
There could’ve been something trite about this generalising of genocide, in abstracting the victims and perpetrators into placeholders. But Palliser isn’t ignoring or apathetic towards the facts of what Strawson called the history of the Jews in the second world war; neither is Sufferance a well-intentioned if clumsy grab at ethical universality (and it has no political goal of de-emphasising the Jewish accent on the victims of the Holocaust). For one its style isn’t so abstract as to be algebraic, like those old French anti-novels where the characters were called X or Y and the literary devices were outed (“Incited by the incident, Protagonist rose to the action”). Rather Palliser’s style is non-specific, which suggests a sounder theory (though one that doesn’t explain everything): as with Amis’s Time’s Arrow, he’s put the specifics off-page so they come better into our heads, the novel landing all the harder because we’ve had to fill in the gaps: exhumation via inhumation. That’s why, although the “protected community” are never named, we do learn the novel’s set in a Christian-majority nation where said community is a longstanding but long-begrudged minority, whose stereotypes are the oxymoronic ones to do with vulgarity combined with elitism, greed combined with thriftiness, and so on. It’s not that hard to guess whom Palliser means.
The fact it’s not hard makes me reckon Palliser wasn’t up to something so simple and so, in its own a way, pointless. Had he meant Jewish people and meant for us to infer that, there’s nothing extra to be gained by such coyness; it’s like the redundancy of allegory. So, if not that, if not trite universalism or an exercise in working-it-out-for-ourselves, what was he up to?
The answer can be found by running the counterfactual. Imagine a version of Sufferance about a young girl called Rachel or Ruth, or one sheltered by the Van Dyks or Pascals, or set in Drogobych or Budapest, or where the villains are the Vichy regime or The Arrow Cross. Forget the first page—from the blurb on we’d recognise how we were meant to feel. And not only about the clearcut rights and wrongs in their black and white but the greys, i.e. the shady civilian majority. We’d have done what Milan Kundera thought most antithetical to the spirit of the novel: rushed to judgment. Or made it already. If too little history impairs our judgement, too much pre-sets it; it freezes our sensibility.
By committing instead the creative-writing-class sin of lacking specificity, Palliser delays recognition and its short cuts; by making Sufferance less concrete he’s restored fiction’s edge to break through the ice and get us see what we might not know yet: that times of sociopolitical catastrophe aren’t ‘at least morally clarifying’; more often than not they’re confounding.
This resharpening of the moral edge of art by declining to rehash art that’s already out there… you can start to see why aesthetics and ethics might not be indifferent to each other but equivalent. Since Palliser doesn’t specify the girl’s community he’s free to play with its stereotypes, reminding us cultural essentialism is, ironically, non-culture specific: any group can be miserly, boorish, a fifth columnist, a burden on the state if the state so wishes. Since he doesn’t name the novel’s time-frame he’s free of temporal appropriation (and, as a bonus, avoids the fact-checking of comment-thread historians).
These stylistic constraints liberated Palliser. But he also constrained his narrative mode, and, beyond a simple following-suit, it’s not obvious why. I think it has something to do with the charge that Strawson and Sebald, in their own ways, might’ve levelled at even a novel as careful as this.
Refreshingly for a contemporary novel, Sufferance isn’t told in the present tense. It’s also told, narrated: as well as no names the novel has no scenes. Palliser hasn’t failed at showing-and-not-telling by mistake or to his novel’s disservice; he holds back from showing, spares us the dangerously available sensual details, the stink of hideouts, the thud of jackboots. This un-scenic mode complements his general lack of lit-fic lyricism. The narrator’s few similes are cloth-eared: he likens the sound of bombs falling to “a huge pancake being dropped”. (Borges said narrators need a justification for being eloquent; if they don’t have one, they shouldn’t be.) Don’t mistake this lack however for the reactionary minimalism of writers who hold by the cliché, to quote Thirlwell again, “that all great literature does not believe in literature.” Palliser’s minimalism follows from a specific vision for his novel. The constrained, contrived way he’s told it exposes, via contrast, the repressed contrivances of other art about this subject that have otherwise become so naturalised. So comfortingly discomforting.
No names, no scenes, no present-tense immediacy or pretty prose, and few telling details: I get this might make Sufferance sound as appealing to read as a redacted court transcript. But I cannot oversell the primal way it fixes your attention, the way you can’t help but watch someone caught in a tightening trap and feel what Rebecca West called the “sympathy evoked by all doomed flesh, any doomed flesh, whatever the value of the spirit that infused it.” How the novel manages this, with and through its constraints, is thanks to one of Palliser’s gutsiest tricks: building in to his novel the in-built irony of his subject.
Think of how cruelly the success of D-Day heard on the wireless tantalises the reader of Anne Frank’s diary as it tantalised the doomed her. The diary’s most routine pages are infused with feeling because we know what’s coming, on that undiarised day after the last page. (Did her betrayers ever hear of her diary’s publication? I try to imagine them reading it.) Then the worst ironies of all: captured Anne Frank put on the last ever transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz, her dying in March when the camp was liberated in April. The heartbreak her fate added to her words “I won’t easily bow down before the blow that will inevitably come.”
Palliser isn’t so touched he won’t draft these ironies into his novel: how, for instance, the reader can tell before the narrator that the reason bribes for protecting the girl have gotten so steep is because she’s being protected not only from persecution but murder. What complicates the irony here is that it’s dramatic irony inspired by the historical, so while there’s the usual grim sense of inevitability of this kind of story, we’re also not sure how bad it’ll go for these fictional characters, if it will go bad.
As Palliser doesn’t shy from dramatic irony, so too he doesn’t from dramatic tension. He takes the ominous way certain entires in Anne Frank’s diary open - “Thursday 16th September 1943: Relationships here in the Annexe are getting worse all the time” - and makes it the refrain of his novel. Most sections start with a stomach-lurching, “At the weekend tensions rose,” or “The next day - Saturday - things came to a head,” or “During the remainder of the third week after the girl’s arrival, things deteriorated”. The refrain occurs so often it skirts black comedy.
Black comedy, historical irony, dramatic tension - aren’t these the kind of intensities Strawson warned of? Isn’t this what Sebald reviled: art under capitalism that turns any enormity into entertainment? But here lies the ultimate liberation of Palliser’s constraints. By embodying said ‘entertainment’ in a withholding literary style and un-scenic narrative mode, by giving it a complicating third-party POV, and by holding to an ethic-aesthetic of knots within knots, he’s preserved decorum and on top of that defamiliarised a whole genre of historical fiction. This Holocaust novel without the Holocaust, that is and isn’t about Anne Frank, reads so unlike other artworks in the genre that to call it sensationalist would be to make a category error.8
Palliser’s constraints have their integrity then. Do they have coherency? To reverse the Borges, would the narrator of Sufferance have cause to be as taciturn as the author? Not least with where he finds himself by the end. His account hasn’t been a self-defence, his “intention was to simply offer a record.” So why would he only ever refer to a “protected community” and the “Enemy”, and to no one by name, including himself? Does that make more or less sense when you consider how anyone within the world of the story that read his account would know whom he meant? Did he generalise out of guilt, then, or to shame by insinuation or to protect the not-so-innocent? What does such reticence gain him and not just Palliser?
Maybe in the options above there’s a legit in-world reason to answer the quibble about coherency. Less so a larger one: whether Palliser’s conceit is appropriately consistent. He doesn’t tell us when the story’s set but we can hazard from the technology - trams, landline phones, wireless meant in the old sense - that it’s set early to mid-20th century. Though he doesn’t tell us the name of the country in which it’s set or where the Enemy come from - only that they invaded from the west - he does tell us it’s a Christian country, and that the narrator keeps watch for the girl’s family in the city’s Viennese Café, suggesting we’re in some part and/or version of Europe. The city has an Old City, where the “protected community” gets forced into a ghetto without it being named as such; and whoever the community are, they can’t be Christian since being four quarters so saves you from intrinsic persecution. A stricter formal vision might’ve omitted these hints, or confused our bearings further, like Palliser does a tad with the invading direction of the Enemy, with their persecution of Protestants as well as Catholics, with the morally exacting inexactitude of his girl.9
Perhaps, though, what I’m calling inconsistency is down to Sufferance having to be a balancing act. Perhaps Palliser wants us to take the novel - for all its constraints against names and details - as still a historical novel with specific if dissimulated links to a real past, and at the same time as a novel that’s been kept general enough to be prophetic in the old sense: an extrapolation from present iniquities to future disaster. (Compare with Paul Lynch’s novel Prophet Song, with which you could double-pack Sufferance.) Perhaps it was only through such a balance - of the historical and imaginative, drama and decorum - that Palliser could prove it’s still possible, and valuable, to make art about this subject. That he could show that the aversion of Sebald - and Adorno, and Michael Haneke (all German-speakers as it happens) - to art about the Holocaust is, in its own way, an easy out.
Authors can no longer fall back on known historical details, fogged as they are in their auras of received feeling. Neither are form and style front-brain falsities that get in the way of some initial truthful voice (see Kerouac’s self-defensive “First thought, best thought”, which ought to be “First thought, herd thought”). As Jerzy Ficowski wrote in his intro to another lost Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz: “the knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulating comes art.” Palliser’s manipulation - his contrivances, his constraints, his knottiness - is how he’s pulled off one of the great imaginative tacklings of this subject in recent memory, the sort of book Kafka longed for: an axe to break the frozen sea inside us. Because it is artful, because it’s a novel.
The transcendence of Roth’s otherwise perverse F.U. to his earlier critics: Wouldn’t Anne Frank living to fulfil her Electra complex by becoming lover-muse to an old male author be inarguably better than her getting murdered by the Nazis?
Or that he based her on Anne Frank’s classmate ‘J’, whom she described as a “sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip who thinks she’s so grown-up… [She’s] easily offended, bursts into tears at the slightest thing and, to top it all, is a terrible show-off. She’s very rich, and has a wardrobe full of the most adorable dresses that are much too old for her.”
This leaves him rationally paranoid, which is neither an oxymoron nor the equivalent of founded fears. Paranoiacs have those too, they just cannot discriminate between the rational and irrational. The characters in Sufferance should not. Their world has gotten so chaotic it’s safer to fear all threats, even the unreal, than to sift for the real ones. As the old joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
For each German killed by the French Resistance, Hitler ordered the execution of fifty prisoners. Who can make calculations like that?
If I’m right in reading here a trace of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, this is a ballsy reclamation of that story’s prophetic verminology: soon enough, the family of transformed Gregor Samsa are shamed and outraged by his burdensome, skin-crawling always there-ness.
Or worse: consider the eventually notorious case of Bruno Dössekker, who assumed the name Binjamin Wilkomirski and wrote Fragments, a ‘memoir’ of his time as a Jewish child in the concentration camps. It won him the Jewish Quarterly Prize for non-fiction and international acclaim. Swiss journalists uncovered Bruno’s real identity: not Jewish let alone a Holocaust survivor. (One of the debunkers, author Elena Lappin, was phoned by real survivors who pointed out various kitschy errors in Fragments: in it Wilkomirski claimed one survival tip he’d received was to stand in shit to keep warm; the camps in fact were usually so cold shit froze.) Psychologists coined ‘Wilkomirski syndrome’ in Bruno’s pseudo-name regarding similar hoaxes or delusions. Another sad secret of his true identity: he may have been one of Switzerland’s Verdigkinder: an indentured child labourer.
Though maybe, as Zuckerman insists, “it was her morale she was sustaining, not, at fourteen, her literary ambition”.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the charge of sensationalism is an odd one: can you over-heighten the emotions of the Holocaust? Better to think in terms of reverence or irreverence, without putting a value judgement either side.
Ursula K Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore trilogy is a better example of how to scramble all variables in writing fiction about genocide or slavery in order to avoid tripping the reader’s conventional responses and get to the realer, more disquieting ones.
The idea of an unsympathetic or obnoxious Holocaust victim isn't new. Way back when the literature was just getting started, you had Sophie of Sophie's Choice whose father was a white supremacist that only belatedly learned that the Nazis didn't think Polish people were white. Vladek in Maus is mostly sympathetic in retrospect but this contrasts sharply with his niggardly, racist attitude in the present-day portions of the story. Even Anne Frank herself has plenty of moments of just being a normal, somewhat annoying teenage girl.
I don't think the philosophy you discuss is necessarily endemic to a Holocaust narrative so much as it is endemic to the narratives we're allowed to tell about the Holocaust in the modern day. It's more useful to certain persons to make it seem as if the Holocaust went after perfect victims. Acknowledge that there's no such thing as a perfect victim, and all of a sudden power relations become much more significant in deciding what is or isn't a genocide than whether or not the people who were killed were asking for it.
Such an excellent and interesting piece. Bravo!