"Snowleg"
(Reviewed by Mary Whipple OCT 12, 2004)
"[The Communist government of East Germany] was formed against fascists and extermination camps…I know this is hard to believe, but we felt we were in battle. We embraced life in the GDR as a true alternative to fascism and war crimes. But to keep our people safe we felt we had to know everything about them and to make this knowledge a respectable, responsible activity. And that's where we went wrong."
In one of the most elegantly written and carefully constructed love stories in recent memory, Nicholas Shakespeare tells the story of Peter Hithersay, who, on his sixteenth birthday, learns from his mother that "Daddy" is not his father. A concert singer who had once gone to Leipzig, East Germany, for a vocal competition, she had met and loved his biological father very briefly, only to see him arrested and taken away, never heard from again. Peter, a British boarding school student, becomes curious about Germany and Germans, accepting a summer job in Hamburg, where he tutors a German Olympic athlete in English but never crosses the border with East Germany. Upon graduation, he does, however, decide to spend his gap year in Germany, and applies for and is accepted to medical school in Hamburg, where he lives for the next six years.
Shortly before his exams during his third year of medical school, some of his friends, members of a traveling mime troupe, invite him to be their stage manager on a trip to Leipzig, an opportunity to visit the place where his unnamed father was arrested. Though he has been warned about the secret police, the constant spying on foreigners, and the dangers of going off on his own, Peter, nevertheless, falls passionately in love with a young East German, whose Icelandic nickname, "Snjolaug," he hears as "Snowleg." At the end of his four-day trip to Leipzig, however, he leaves her behind, and all his subsequent letters to her go unanswered. Though he has never learned her real name, she is the love of Peter's life, and he never gives up hope of finding her.
Peter's search for Snowleg, and secondarily, for his father, over the next twenty years, alternates with flashbacks and memories, as the relationship of Peter and Snowleg unfolds. Unable to form any other close attachments with women ("There was something barren about Peter's heart."), Peter has always settled for affairs, while studying, first, pediatrics, and later, gerontology and moving from Hamburg to Berlin, with occasional visits to England. When Frau Weschke, a 103-year-old patient, to whom he is especially close, dies in the nursing home where he works, Peter, now in his early forties, promises to deliver her effects to her granddaughter, Frau Metzel, in Leipzig. With Germany now reunified, he also hopes to obtain the old Stasi files on his mother and learn the name and fate of his father.
The role of the East German secret police, the conditions which led to citizens reporting on other citizens, and the conflicts between the original ideal of communism with its later cynical implementation by sadistic bureaucrats are carefully delineated. These provide a perspective that elevates this novel above the typical love story and offer fresh insights into the action in Leipzig. Two secret police officers, Uwe and Hesse, whom we meet in the prologue and later at the end of the novel, reveal the personal, emotional costs of being part of the Communist bureaucracy, where it is often necessary to act against one's own instincts. As the story of Snowleg and her family evolves in Leipzig, the reader also sees how all aspects of the family and its life are interwoven, with all family members paying for the actions of individual family members.
The vibrancy of Shakespeare's prose makes every page of this story a delight to read. Filled with irony and, often, humor, the dialogue comes alive. When Peter and the mime troupe meet their landlady in Leipzig, for example, she recognizes that Peter is not originally from Germany and asks where he is from. "Ah, England," she says, and shows him a postcard she once received from nearby Winnipeg. Later, when Peter thanks her for a delicious meal, she mishears and tells him that her teeth were made in Hungary.
Unforgettable descriptions, especially of the darkness, the cold, and the soot in Leipzig, often reveal feelings as well as convey information. Of the soot, Shakespeare notes, "There were slashes of it in the sky like something crumbled into water and even the pigeons clustered along the aerials seemed coated with it." The façades of houses are described as "the gray color of anchovy paste," and "dead-colored in the snow as though fun had been ripped from them." When a song plays on the radio in Leipzig, for Peter "the song had red eyes and ran furtively across his mind…It was a rat dressed up as a promise." Similarly effective comments on the action also abound. A young patient's death creates in Peter, "Remorse. The bird that never settles."
Repeating motifs—a van with a fish painted on it, a dying deer, the story of Sir Bedevere, a fur coat, and the bones of a muskrat—echo throughout the novel and connect scenes symbolically. On one occasion, when Peter has denied help to someone who needs it, he thinks back to Sir Bedevere, a character he and his sister used to admire, and hears "the receding gallop of hoofs, of the visored figure."
Like most romances, the story relies to some extent on coincidence and fortuitous accident, but Shakespeare's writing is so strong and the story is so exciting that even the most jaded reader will willingly accept the implausibilities. With an exciting and emotional story, unique imagery and observations, a well drawn though imperfect main character, and with every detail contributing to the story's development, this novel is a pleasure to read on all counts. In the UK, where the book has been out since January, the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize selected this novel for its longlist for best book of the year.
- Amazon readers rating:
from 5 reviews
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
- The Vison of Elena Silves (1989)
- The High Flyer (1993)
- The Dancer Upstairs (1995)
- Snowleg (October 2004)
- Secrets of the Sea ( 2007; (June 2008 in US)
Nonfiction:
- The Men Who Would Be King: A Look of Royalty in Exile (1984)
- Londoners (1986)
- Bruce Chatwin (1999)
- In Tasmania: A House at the End of the World (December 2004)
Movies from Books:
- The Dancer Upstairs (2002)
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Book Marks:
- British Council page on Nicholas Shakespeare
- BoldType Magazine on Bruce Chatwin (with excerpt)
- The Richmond Review on Bruce Chatwin
- BoldTyple Magazine on The Dancer Upstairs (with excerpt)
- Avatar review of The Dancer Upstairs
- The Guardian review of Snowleg
- The Age review of Snowleg
- ReviewOfBooks.com collection of reviews for Snowleg
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About the Author:
Nicholas Shakespeare was born in Worcester, England in 1957. He spent his childhood in the Far East and in South America where his father
worked as a diplomat. After graduating from Cambridge University he worked as a
journalist and was literary editor of both the Daily and Sunday Telegraph newspapers between 1988 and 1991. The Vision of Elena Silves won both the Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award and The Dancer Upstairs won the American Library Association Award in 1997. After The Higher Flyer Shakespeare was named as one of Granta magazine's twenty "Best of Young British Novelists."
