Novel set in East Berlin and London

29th August 2019

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, novel set in East Berlin and London.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019

The Beatles iconic “Abbey Road” photograph was taken on 8 August 1969. It is 50 years ago and this novel is in small part a homage to that iconic shot and their music. As the book opens a person of indeterminate sex – someone with dark locks, a pearl necklace and striking blue eyes – is knocked over on that very same crossing in 1988. It turns out that the victim is Saul Adler. The driver Wolfgang, in a smart car, brushed past him in his car and caused him to topple. Saul hurt his hip and bloodied his clothes.

Saul lives in London and as a researcher of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), with a specialism in the psychopathy of male tyrants, and he is just about to head off to East Berlin. As a present to his host and translator, Walter Müller, he gets his then girlfriend and photographer Jennifer Moreau (not to be confused with actress Jeanne Moreau) to take his photo on the crossing in the manner of the Beatles. The blood from his injury will be encapsulated forever. He will take a copy of the photograph with him as a gift for Walter’s sister Luna (who is a great Beatles fan). He also intends to take a can of tinned pineapple (in syrup), only he forgets to buy it. A shame, really, because his host family has set much store by this acquisition (an impossible commodity to buy in the East at that time).

He arrives in East Berlin and lodges with Walter’s mother and sister and gets on with carrying out his researches at the University.

Saul has a German heritage and his father was a life long Communist, so there is also the question of where to bury a matchbox with just a token of his father’s ashes. It would be appropriate, he feels, to bury them on Communist, German soil, so he forever has an eye out for a suitable location.

That summarises the first half of the book.

Moving forward to June 2016, just after the UK voted to leave the EU, the second half of the book is a reflection on both past and present  It is a meditation on confusion, lunacy and mis-remembering. Characters from then pop up in the here and now but in the wrong setting.

It is as if Saul is looking through the lens of a camera, trying to make sense of his place in the world both then and now, but there is a veil of narcotics and madness through which he must understand his place. He ponders his spontaneous sexual encounters (which I felt came out the blue, but which establish him as bisexual) and what love means to him. He is plagued by the thought of Stasi surveillance, fancying he is their target both on East German soil and in London. That in itself is enough to drive anyone to mad and confused thoughts.

The author captures the sense of East Berlin behind the Wall. Luna is keen to flee to Liverpool to be nearer to the Beatles legacy. Rainer, whom Saul meets in 1988 seems to be a fixer and spy and later comes to Saul in another guise. Food shortages (no bananas), brown coal, Trabis and Wartburgs all slide into this extremely well written and stylish novel. The storyline toys with psychological theories – black and white / division and separation, sexual identity, the effect of surveillance, parenthood and politics. I am guessing that the author is making a statement about Brexit and that, like her story, very important elements have been thrown into a blender, mixed arbitrarily together and left to the whim of circumstance and those in power, producing a rather unfortunate and mad-making outcome. A novel to be read with authoritarian politics in mind, for here lies madness, no doubt.

The Independent quite rightly calls this a Rubik’s Cube of a book.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

And for a bit of fun you can zoom in on the live webcam that focusses directly on the zebra crossing by the Abbey Road studios here

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