The Glass Pearls
by Emeric Pressburger
Emeric Pressburger is best known as an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and producer. He was also, however, the author of two novels. Killing a Mouse on Sunday, a thriller set right after the Spanish Civil War, was published to great acclaim in 1961, translated into over a dozen languages and adapted (as Behold a Pale Horse) into a Hollywood movie starring Omar Sharif and Gregory Peck. On the contrary, The Glass Pearls (1966) was given scant attention and the only review it garnered – on the Times Literary Supplement – was a damning one. The novel’s reputation has suffered since then, but its republication as part of the Faber Editions series – Faber’s reproposals of wrongly-neglected 20th century classics – should go a long way towards addressing that. And it is, indeed, high time for The Glass Pearls to be reassessed.
The novel’s premise can be briefly summed up. One morning in June 1965, nondescript piano tuner Karl Braun moves into new lodgings in Pimlico. Soon enough (too soon for that disappointed TLS reviewer), we learn that Braun is actually Dr Otto Reithmüller, a Nazi brain surgeon who conducted infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. Braun hopes that he will evade punishment thanks to the twenty-year statute of limitations which is due to lapse imminently. Just before this happens, however, the term is extended by five years and, as luck would have it, a widely-reported trial shines a spotlight on Braun/Reithmüller’s past sins. The protagonist continues to conduct what seems a placid, normal life – going to concerts and plays, going out with a younger woman – while playing a game of cat-and-mouse with his real or imagined pursuers.
Stylistically, The Glass Pearls is what we would expect from a scriptwriter of Pressburger’s talent. The prose can be utilitarian, but it has a compelling streak of quasi-comedic irony. The dialogue is crisp and witty. The plot, which borrows many tropes of the noir, is taut and involving, and the final chapters are worthy of a thriller.
But what makes The Glass Pearls really worthy of rediscovery is the moral conundrum at its heart. Philosophers and psychologists trying to come to grips with the horrors of the Shoah have spoken of the “banality of evil” and questioned how ordinary people could carry out acts of sadistic violence. Pressburger explores the same themes through fiction. And he does so chillingly and disturbingly by making readers sympathise with his villian. I dare you to go through this novel without – guiltily – hoping the Braun will make it to the end unscathed. In his movies, Pressburger is intrigued by the figure of the “good German”, refusing to demonise all Germans for the atrocities of the Nazis. But what he proposes in The Glass Pearls is far more shocking – namely that a war criminal can, in many other respects, be a more than decent human being.
What are we to make of this? Was Pressburger perhaps a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. He came from a Jewish family, had relatives (including his mother) who died in Nazi concentration camps, and escaped a similar fate only by fleeing to Paris and then on to England before the War. Yet, Pressburger gives his Nazi main character some of his own traits and life history. Perhaps this reflects a sense of survivor’s guilt on the author’s part. More importantly, it is a novelistic rendering of Hannah Arendt’s observation about Eichmann that:
The trouble... was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
In the 1960’s, with memories of the Second World War
still fresh and current, the “moral morass” explored by this novel would have
come across as not only discomfiting but also as potentially weyward and outrageous. Six decades later, the time has come to
recognise the surprising philosophical depth of Pressburger’s little thriller.
The new Faber edition has an introduction by Anthony Quinn.
ebook
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