The Enemy Within
Alison MacLeod, Unexploded
Hamish Hamilton, 352pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780241142639
reviewed by David Anderson
It took until the end of the ‘Phoney War’ for the British to really act on the fear that German, Austrian and Italian migrants might rise up to augment a potential invasion, forming an insidious ‘fifth column’ of hostile forces. Up until 1940, only 486 ‘aliens’ had been interned, but as the prospect of German advance loomed ever greater, pressure from the right-wing press coalesced with growing nationalist sentiment, and was enriched by the voices of figures like Nevile Bland (who had been a British minister in the Hague and had witnessed the fall of Holland first-hand), declaring that all Germans and Austrians ‘ought to be interned at once.’
Tens of thousands were imprisoned; no matter that for the bulk of these migrants, their status as refugees was naturally coextensive with an antipathy towards the Nazi state. Even the small-scale internment of 1939 had seemed fairly arbitrary. The historian Tony Kushner notes that even Eugen Speir,
a friend of Churchill and a bitter opponent of appeasement, found himself interned with several hundred Aliens at Olympia in October 1939. Looking around and seeing that half the internees were fellow German Jews or anti-Nazis, Spier wondered if the internment lists had not been drawn up by the Gestapo.
Alison MacLeod’s novel Unexploded, longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, is set firmly within the paranoid paroxysm of 1940-41, as the home front chaotically readied itself for invasion, before the gradual softening of public sentiment that came with its non-arrival.
Geoffrey Beaumont is superintendent of an internment camp at the race-course in Brighton, where the prisoners make and mix cement. A pragmatic grammar-school boy with an Oxford degree, he is branch manager at Lloyd’s bank (and therefore not conscripted). His wife Evelyn represents the more cultivated side of the partnership. As a youth her reading went from ‘Sir Walter Scott to Walter Pater,’ while a formative year spent in Paris (playing truant from her finishing-school) saw her even dropping by at André Breton’s ‘Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries’ in the Rue de Grenelle. She is a fervent admirer of Virginia Woolf, who features in person, her eyes meeting Evelyn’s during a lecture given half-way through the book. Predictably, Evelyn is uneasy about the internment camp, and the more she learns about it, the uneasier she becomes, only to be met with the mulish responses of her spouse:
The need for cement was, he’d explained to her, acute. In Brighton, there were few priorities greater than gun emplacements and public shelters. How could he justify the loss of labour at such a time?
MacLeod’s prose succeeds here in accurately delineating and mimicking Geoffrey’s persona, for the formal tenor of these terse sentences belies a secret anxiety about his wife’s interest in one internee in particular: Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ painter whose release from Sachsenhausen was successfully brokered days before the outbreak of war by the Lord Bishop of Chichester. Back behind bars, the grim parallels between his experiences of the two camps are clear – the race-course forms a dispiriting replica of its more famous German counterpart.
The problematic distinction of what separates ‘us’ (in our kitchens) from ‘them’ (in the camps) contributes to a convincing effect of psychological immediacy, compounding the anxieties associated with empty beaches, and the more familiar us/them of the British/the Germans. This dilemma is embellished by the strange spectacle of the Beaumont family sat around the wireless, listening not only to the reassuring voice of ‘Alvar Liddell, dressed in his BBC announcer’s dinner jacket’, but also the sinister, nasal tones of ‘Lord Haw Haw’ broadcasting the opposite side of the story on Radio Bremen. This type of fraught ambivalence is very much the substance of the novel, and the jarring atmospheres of fascism at home as well as on the continent are impressively articulated through the children’s credulous voices. Philip and his friends listen to Oswald Mosley’s speeches on long-playing records, throwing around words like ‘Hitler’ and ‘Jew’, playing at war while carrying real-life gas-masks.
As Mrs Dalrymple - a down-to-earth neighbour whose advantageous marriage lifted her from the London slums to the Beaumonts’ refined street - remarks to Philip, it isn’t hard to imagine the have-a-go gardeners of Park Crescent digging just as energetically for Hitler. Anything to escape from the tenuousness of the moment. But at the same time, both Geoffrey and Evelyn find themselves falling for the lustrous odour of ‘otherness’ to be found in the persons of Otto the painter, communing with Evelyn over the sensuousness of Woolf’s The Waves, and Leah, an Odessan Jewess who revives Geoffrey’s flagging virility.
On both sides of the family, the book’s rendition of seduction and transgression is carried off with assurance, the interweaving of simultaneous events at the Camp and the ‘Gentleman’s Lodging House’ proving a particular instance of MacLeod’s flair for prosaic intensity. As the explosive consequences of their actions unfurl, MacLeod’s nuanced style does an impressive job of presenting the reconstruction of personal relationships under conditions that turn everyone into an ‘imposter’, whilst probing the basis for the Beaumonts’ casual anti-Semitism. It might be true that MacLeod has a tendency towards moments of un-finessed hindsight, and she is certainly prone to the odd historical inaccuracy (these have been laid out faithfully by Adam Mars-Jones in the London Review of Books). But ultimately she has hewn an economical fiction from the rather blunt facts of early World War Two, managing to modulate fear and anxiety into a tension that draws one on without dragging. Tightly structured but not hermetic, Unexploded is a worthy - if not especially challenging - name on the Booker longlist.
Tens of thousands were imprisoned; no matter that for the bulk of these migrants, their status as refugees was naturally coextensive with an antipathy towards the Nazi state. Even the small-scale internment of 1939 had seemed fairly arbitrary. The historian Tony Kushner notes that even Eugen Speir,
a friend of Churchill and a bitter opponent of appeasement, found himself interned with several hundred Aliens at Olympia in October 1939. Looking around and seeing that half the internees were fellow German Jews or anti-Nazis, Spier wondered if the internment lists had not been drawn up by the Gestapo.
Alison MacLeod’s novel Unexploded, longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, is set firmly within the paranoid paroxysm of 1940-41, as the home front chaotically readied itself for invasion, before the gradual softening of public sentiment that came with its non-arrival.
Geoffrey Beaumont is superintendent of an internment camp at the race-course in Brighton, where the prisoners make and mix cement. A pragmatic grammar-school boy with an Oxford degree, he is branch manager at Lloyd’s bank (and therefore not conscripted). His wife Evelyn represents the more cultivated side of the partnership. As a youth her reading went from ‘Sir Walter Scott to Walter Pater,’ while a formative year spent in Paris (playing truant from her finishing-school) saw her even dropping by at André Breton’s ‘Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries’ in the Rue de Grenelle. She is a fervent admirer of Virginia Woolf, who features in person, her eyes meeting Evelyn’s during a lecture given half-way through the book. Predictably, Evelyn is uneasy about the internment camp, and the more she learns about it, the uneasier she becomes, only to be met with the mulish responses of her spouse:
The need for cement was, he’d explained to her, acute. In Brighton, there were few priorities greater than gun emplacements and public shelters. How could he justify the loss of labour at such a time?
MacLeod’s prose succeeds here in accurately delineating and mimicking Geoffrey’s persona, for the formal tenor of these terse sentences belies a secret anxiety about his wife’s interest in one internee in particular: Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ painter whose release from Sachsenhausen was successfully brokered days before the outbreak of war by the Lord Bishop of Chichester. Back behind bars, the grim parallels between his experiences of the two camps are clear – the race-course forms a dispiriting replica of its more famous German counterpart.
The problematic distinction of what separates ‘us’ (in our kitchens) from ‘them’ (in the camps) contributes to a convincing effect of psychological immediacy, compounding the anxieties associated with empty beaches, and the more familiar us/them of the British/the Germans. This dilemma is embellished by the strange spectacle of the Beaumont family sat around the wireless, listening not only to the reassuring voice of ‘Alvar Liddell, dressed in his BBC announcer’s dinner jacket’, but also the sinister, nasal tones of ‘Lord Haw Haw’ broadcasting the opposite side of the story on Radio Bremen. This type of fraught ambivalence is very much the substance of the novel, and the jarring atmospheres of fascism at home as well as on the continent are impressively articulated through the children’s credulous voices. Philip and his friends listen to Oswald Mosley’s speeches on long-playing records, throwing around words like ‘Hitler’ and ‘Jew’, playing at war while carrying real-life gas-masks.
As Mrs Dalrymple - a down-to-earth neighbour whose advantageous marriage lifted her from the London slums to the Beaumonts’ refined street - remarks to Philip, it isn’t hard to imagine the have-a-go gardeners of Park Crescent digging just as energetically for Hitler. Anything to escape from the tenuousness of the moment. But at the same time, both Geoffrey and Evelyn find themselves falling for the lustrous odour of ‘otherness’ to be found in the persons of Otto the painter, communing with Evelyn over the sensuousness of Woolf’s The Waves, and Leah, an Odessan Jewess who revives Geoffrey’s flagging virility.
On both sides of the family, the book’s rendition of seduction and transgression is carried off with assurance, the interweaving of simultaneous events at the Camp and the ‘Gentleman’s Lodging House’ proving a particular instance of MacLeod’s flair for prosaic intensity. As the explosive consequences of their actions unfurl, MacLeod’s nuanced style does an impressive job of presenting the reconstruction of personal relationships under conditions that turn everyone into an ‘imposter’, whilst probing the basis for the Beaumonts’ casual anti-Semitism. It might be true that MacLeod has a tendency towards moments of un-finessed hindsight, and she is certainly prone to the odd historical inaccuracy (these have been laid out faithfully by Adam Mars-Jones in the London Review of Books). But ultimately she has hewn an economical fiction from the rather blunt facts of early World War Two, managing to modulate fear and anxiety into a tension that draws one on without dragging. Tightly structured but not hermetic, Unexploded is a worthy - if not especially challenging - name on the Booker longlist.