The Kingdom Of Ashes

Robert Edric

Editions

Review

Robert Edric is one of our most prolific contemporary novelists.  Besides his recent trilogy of crime novels set in Hull, this is his fourteenth novel; the last two have been longlisted for the Man-Booker Prize.  His work is serious but highly readable.  Moral confusions animate it, often in the context of a collapsed society or one on the brink of collapse.  His historical backgrounds range widely: the Arctic of the 1845 Franklin Expedition (Broken Lands, 1992); Conrad’s Congo (The Book Of The Heathen pbk £6.99, 2000); Tasmania in 1864 (Elysium, 1995); the First World War (In Desolate Heaven pbk £6.99, 1997).  They are vividly portrayed, with a lightness of touch that makes one hesitate to call them historical novels.  No detail is there just for period flavour.

‘The Kingdom Of Ashes’ is a complimentary work to Peacetime pbk £6.99, 2002, which focused on the decommissioning of an airfield in East Anglia just after the Second World War.  Now Edric has turned his attention to a provincial town in Germany where a British officer, Alex Foster, is employed interrogating German prisoners at an ‘Assessment and Evaluation’ centre.  The Nuremberg Trials are underway and everyone is aware that this is a sideshow: much of the work may be futile and unrecognised, crimes may go unpunished, yet it is clear that vast and horrific crimes have been committed.

It is worth considering the entire first paragraph:

‘Alex Foster leaned forward and looked down at the corpses. The slab of fractured concrete on which he was standing rocked slightly, and the man beside him held Alex’s arm as the ground beneath them settled. Alex thanked the man and then turned back to the bodies. Rods of rusted and twisted metal protruded from the edge of the concrete; elsewhere, this reinforcing mesh had already been cut away and discarded.’

The prose is precise and rhythmic, soberly descriptive.  Death is introduced immediately, examined with a well-intentioned, careful, appraising eye, but from a position that is ‘fractured and ‘rocky’.  Technical details are noted, for life and death in Edric’s worlds are often subjects for technicians. Preconceptions will not be ‘reinforced’ but forced apart by extreme circumstances; ‘mesh’ will be discarded; people and their values will be exposed as little more than ‘rods of rusted and twisting metal’.  This paragraph could not have been written by anybody else.

It emerges very soon that near the civilian bodies uncovered in the cellar is another group, evidently prisoners from a concentration camp.  Does anybody know who they are?  Does anybody care?  It is presumed that the locals know, but it isn’t in their interests to go into the matter – the venal new Mayor is much more interested in constructing a War Memorial and moving on. Nor does Colonel Dyer, the senior British officer, want to be distracted with inconvenient bygones: he likes to feel his own power, and requires his underlings to restrict themselves to their explicit instructions.  Among these are interviews that Alex is obliged to conduct with a couple of prisoners on behalf of the Americans.  One of them may have been involved in a confused massacre of prisoners but it is impossible to establish independently whether he was there or not.  But the Americans want scalps – and does it really matter if he was definitely there or not because it’s certain that if he were there then he would have been involved?  The other, regardless of his crimes, is useful to them in an exchange with the Russians for a scientist.

Woven into this story is a local one.  Alex starts up a relationship with Eva, one of the translators at the Institute.  Nina, a friend of hers, has a half starved teenage sister who is heavily pregnant from a passing American soldier.  Doctor Whittaker, Alex’s colleague, goes to visit her in a ramshackle camp and wishes to transfer her to the town hospital.  But he doesn’t have the authority to do this, and the German authorities don’t want anything to do with her because she represents aspects of their recent history that they would rather ignore.  It becomes increasingly unclear whether Whittaker’s laudable behaviour actually helps her, or anyone else, in the long run.  Indeed by getting drugs from Jesus Hernandez, the American officer’s driver who operates a thriving black market, he buys in to just the corruption he detests.  The only character who might be called pure is Eva’s deluded younger brother, Kurt, a relic of the Hitler Youth who understandably and bitterly resents the high-handed actions of the British and American authorities to the huts where he lives in the woods with is friends.

Edric handles the many characters and threads of this complex novel with his habitual, consummate skill.  It is remarkable that anyone should attempt to write so many novels with such varied contexts, but that he should manage to do so with such consistent brilliance is astounding. 

Review in the ‘Literary Review’ - review by Johnny de Falbe