He was a camera

Patrick Skene Catling

THE PARDON OF SAINT ANNE by William Palmer Cape, £9.99, pp. 252 Reality may seem more manageable in still, two-dimensional slices. Like Isher- wood in Berlin, the protagonist of William Palmer's absorbing, though chillingly hope- less, new novel, his fourth, is a witness of some of Germany's most destructive 20th- century ills who remains safely on the fringe of events. Up to a point. He is one of these peculiarly modern non-partisan non- heroes, a photographer.

Palmer lives in the West Midlands with his wife and daughter and yet is able to empathise convincingly with an Anglo- German (German father, English mother) who spends his adult life in the Third Reich, from chaotic economic depression to the final chaos of Armageddon. The years from 1932 to 1944 had their interest- ing ups and downs for a photographer in Germany.

The novel is divided into four eras, declining from preciousness to baseness, the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, recording Walther Klinger's progress from eager apprentice to journeyman at a dead end. The happy times are very few and far between, but Palmer's carefully restrained, cool prose sustains one's interest in a story whose only uncertainty is how and when young Walther will reach term. It becomes apparent quite early that his camera won't save him for ever from nemesis. Even a `Cool swing man.' photographer risks becoming involved. Walther is only 12 when he discovers that he prefers to look at life through a viewfinder. In his small home town in the Rhineland, his mother, widowed in the first world war, is evidently having an affair with a lieutenant of the hated French army of occupation, but Walther is aware of the foreigner only as the owner of a camera who kindly gives him instruction in its use, and then gives him the camera itself.

Having a modest private income, Walther is able to undertake what might otherwise be a financially precarious career as a freelance photographer. He encoun- ters an 'Official Spa Photographer,' one Michael Valenti, a shady opportunist, and is dazzled by his

amazing array of cameras . .. his ICA reflex, the small fast Ermanox, the beautiful Leica.

Walther sees in Valenti the perfect mentor:

. he had been a press photographer in Berlin. He had photographed fires, murder victims, accidents, suicides, weddings, funer- als, goalkeepers, golfers, royalty, winning horses, statesmen, movie stars.

He left what Walther regards as 'this won- derful world' because of what Valenti laughingly calls 'a slight error of judgment': He had worked for private detectives — `Dirty work — they need the truth' — and as

a society photographer — 'Dirtier . they want only falsehood.'

This paragon of commercial photography complaisantly encourages his mistress to relieve Walther of his virginity (he is thus doubly deflowered, sexually as well as artistically), and then suddenly takes off, leaving behind his Leica. Walther is now prepared, at the age of 17, to move to Berlin, in time for the ascendancy of the Nazi regime.

To him, at that time, the early 1930s,

the whole adult world was . . . a grotesque comedy which I viewed with a mixture Of self-righteousness and avid desire.

It is his ambition to become . .. the Rimbaud of the filmroll, the laureate of the soup-kitchen ... Of the lounging SA man on the street corner. Of the car roaring past, red banner streaming behind, laden with revolvers and certainty, a slogan shouted as it turned the corner.

He thinks of photography as an art and himself as an artist, even when his private and public work spoil each other. As a soldier in the second world war, he is deaf- ened by an explosion and thus freed to serve self-indulgently on a quiet edge of Fortress Europe. There, in rural Brittany, he keeps taking photographs, falls in love with a displaced Irishwoman, and witnesses the Pardon of Saint Anne, a church festival at which indulgences are granted — but not to him.

This depressing romance is an eminently successful cautionary tale about the function and the possible dangerous malfunction of Art.