17 DECEMBER 1965, Page 20

Gothic Masterpiece

GUNTHER GRASS is the bright particular star of contemporary German literature and a new novel by him is, or should be, a portent. For Herr Grass, in addition to his enormous talents, represents a generation of Germans who, by reason of their age untainted by the guilt, or the sense of guilt, associated with National Social- ism, yet stand close enough to it to be capable of an insight and understanding that are beyond the reach of anyone who is not a German.

Dog Years is precisely a vast panorama, in time and space, of the Germany which created and suffered the nightmare of National Social- • ism and emerged from it, defeated, disgraced and partitioned, into the era of the two Ger- manies which stare at each other across the Elbe with strangely mixed feelings of mutual attrac- tion and repulsion. It begins in Danzig, on the Vistula, at the beginning of this century and ends in Dtisseldorf, on the Rhine, in the age of the Wirtschaftswunder. Between these limits Herr Grass's heroes, the partly Jewish Edward Amsel, with a genius for manufacturing scare- crows, his friend, persecutor and avenger, Walter Matern, the dog Prinz which was once a gift from the German nation to the Fiihrer, wander in time and space over the whole of Germany, as in some macabre Bildungsrontan in which it is not only characters but a nation which is enduring a terrible and ruthless process of edu- cation. And if it is a Bildungsroman, of a rather special kind, it is also a picaresque romance, also of a rather special kind, in which the most unlikely adventures occur, though always re- counted on the assumption, both grim and humorous, that they were no more unlikely than events that were occurring every day throughout the length and breadth of the Reich.

So large a design, intricately and elaborately woven out of materials that hardly seem to belong to a human world, would test the powers of any writer; it is sufficient to say that Herr Grass triumphantly survives the test. English readers may at times find Dog Years a difficult book, though the translation is admirable. Herr Grass writes within an enormously wide scale of reference to a world which, in its emotional climate, its moral (or immoral) assumptions, even in its everyday details, is rather more alien and unfamiliar to an English reader than, let us say, those of the Congo; and his style is com- pounded of so many elements of parody, of satire, of grotesque humour, that for some its underlying realism and sobriety may at first be concealed. There are moments when Dog Years affects one like some great Gothic cathedral in which soaring flights of imagination and fan- tasy coincide with the representation of the humblest and most prosaic reality.

Only, of course, Dog Years is not a structure dedicated to the glory of God; it springs out of an experience in the deepest pits of hell and is all the more authentic because Herr Grass persuades us that even hell ban be funny. It is, I think, a very remarkable book; it inclines one to believe that Herr Grass is the most gifted and the most serious novelist now alive.

GORONWY REES