Audrey Magee’s impressive debut novel begins with a very unromantic wedding. It’s 1941 on the Eastern Front, and a young German soldier called Peter Faber is saying his vows to a photograph of a girl he’s never met. A former schoolteacher from Darmstadt, he has agreed to this proxy marriage of convenience so that he will get some honeymoon leave and his unseen bride, Katharina Spinell, will get a widow’s pension if he dies.
Peter gets his leave and travels to Berlin to meet Katharina and her parents, ambitious Nazi supporters who had higher hopes for their daughter than a provincial teacher. But there’s an immediate attraction between the unlikely couple, and when Peter returns to the front the thought of the other – and later their son, conceived during their brief honeymoon – keeps both of them going.
Magee’s picture of the front is superbly rendered, and her terse, understated prose is the perfect medium for Peter’s story as his regiment makes its way through the Russian countryside, laying waste to villages as they go. Her depiction of Stalingrad and its increasingly chaotic horror has a visceral, nightmarish quality that’s made more powerful by the matter-of-fact tone. Starving, surrounded by corpses and faeces, and increasingly aware that no help is coming from Berlin, the soldiers gradually capitulate, and Magee depicts it without sentiment and with chilling simplicity.
Of course, the ostensibly gemütlich Berlin in which Katharina lives is terrifyingly brutal in its own way. Peter stole the wedding ring he presents to his wife from the hand of an elderly Jewish women whom he helped forcibly evict from her home in the capital. Thanks to their high-ranking Nazi friend Dr Weinart, Katharina and her family move into a beautiful new apartment that previously belonged to a Jewish family. They throw out the owners' books and bust of Mendelssohn but keep their clothes, cashmere blankets and grand piano. Mrs Spinell's only worry is whether it's wrong to wear a "Jewish" dress.
Neither Katharina nor Peter is actively political. Peter's family are not Nazis, but he's quickly impressed by Mr Spinell's talk of Lebensraum, and he justifies the atrocities on the front with the thought that it's all for the ultimate good of Germany. Meanwhile Katharina works her way into a circle of Nazi wives, impressed by their fine clothes and their ability to acquire delicious food. It's a world in which it's impossible to progress without being tainted.
But while Magee is brilliant at presenting the bigger picture, she’s less successful when it comes to people. She presents characters’ interactions largely through pages of unfiltered dialogue, and although Magee’s terse style works well enough when it comes to the soldiers’ conversations in the field, in general the dialogue feels mannered and stilted. The characters constantly address each other by name, possibly to make sure the reader knows who is talking, but the effect is jarring and awkward.
So much direct speech in a novel could create an immediate and intense atmosphere, but many of these scenes feel airless, and the characters have no room to come alive. This isn’t helped by the fact that, with the exception of Peter’s half-Russian comrade, Faustmann, the characters are not introspective. If they do think anything, we’re not really privy to it. Magee may be making the good point that a lack of introspection is part of what facilitates fascist brutality, but as a result even Katharina and Peter remain oblique to the point of being boring.
But it's a testament to Magee's skill that, despite these weaknesses, The Undertaking is still so powerful. And there are scenes – a traumatised soldier's attempts to create a home in the middle of hell, a horrific act of parental callousness in a Berlin cellar – that will linger in the reader's memory long after finishing this very promising debut.
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
1. Despite its unusual origins, a real closeness develops between Peter and Katharina. What did you think of their relationship and how it evolves?
2. Much of The Undertaking is told through dialogue. What did you think of the use of dialogue in the novel?
3. Although neither Katharina or Peter are actively political before the war, both become complicit in the Nazi regime. What do you think the author is saying about human nature during the Nazi era?
4. Magee depicts the horrific treatment of the Jewish community in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the abusers - Peter directly participates in the abuse of Jewish families while Katharina and her parents take advantage of the expulsion of a Jewish family from their home. What effect does seeing this horror from the point of view of those who benefited from it have on the reader?
5. Peter's regiment fights at Stalingrad. How do you think Magee conveys the horror of the lengthy battle?
6. Katharina is close to her parents but they betray her horrifically towards the end of the war. What did you think of how the author portrayed the family dynamic?
