Review: Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll

 

Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll 

Kobo reviewed my reading habits and suggested this to me as a book that I might enjoy. Seeing that it was by an Australia author, was literary crime fiction in an historical setting, I agreed that it looked right up my alley, so I purchased it on a whim (well done Kobo). 

The story is set in post WWII England (1947 specifically). The story begins with the death of Martin Friedrich, a renowned German philosopher and former Nazi Party member, who is hit killed by a speeding car while cycling to deliver a lecture at Cambridge University. Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born Cockney Jew whose parents were interned during the war, is assigned to investigate the case. 

Minter starts investigating, looking into Friedrich's life and uncovering unsavoury truths about the man - his past as a Nazi supporter, his arrogance and selfishness, and his dishonourable treatment of the women that he tricks into his life until they have served their purpose for him. The story oscillates between the different characters, slowly drawing together the threads of their individual narratives to reach the culmination where the truth behind Freidrich's accident is exposed.  

One of the most striking aspects of the book for me was how meaning emerged from a series of coincidences and randomness, and not from a carefully constructed plan or motives. Usually, crime fiction reveals an intentional plot toward some criminal end. Carroll gives us a piece of crime fiction involving chance events. I think was deliberate - to show that cause and effect isn't always a straight line. This is relevant to the post-war world the story is set in, where the characters are left a little bereft with the world and the ways of life that they once believed they knew having been destroyed. 

Maybe what I am trying to say is that Carroll seems less interested in who killed Friedrich, and more in what the aftermath of his death exposes in the lives of the people around him. For example, their grief following his death, their grief following the way, their dislocation from their homes (for some) and family (for others). Perhaps he is using Friedrich's death and its aftermath almost as a metaphor for the war and its aftermath. 

It is definitely a very thoughtful novel, and I recommend it - even if I couldn't honestly say that I loved it.