Two dreads are better than one
Francis King
THE RAT by Gunther Grass Seeker & Warburg, f12.95
At my preparatory school before the war, there was a diminutive boy who believed, along with the rest of his family and the sect to which they belonged, that God would let the curtain fall on the human drama at a specified date. The date passed, universal darkness failed to bury all. The boy then explained that there had merely been a human error in the calcula- tion of the year of the fatal tryst. Dooms- day had been delayed, not cancelled. The same apocalyptic dread — which Can also, strangely, be an apocalyptic yearning — still blows in chilling gusts through our world. But it is now all too often associated not with God but with nuclear weapons or even, in recent years, with Aids. It is this apocalyptic dread that has inspired Gunther Grass's The Rat, as it has also inspired Martin Amis's brilliant collection of stories, Einstein's Monsters, which I reviewed here a few weeks ago. Along with this apocalyptic dread, as though a patient were suffering from typhoid and malaria at one and the same time, there is also, in Grass's case, an ecoj
, °gical one. This ecological dread takes
the form of the conviction that, while we are waiting to destroy each other with
destroying missiles, we are already
uestroying our natural habitat with the aerosols that we launch into the ozone layer the waste that we dump into our rivers and oceans, and the pesticides that we spray over our fields. Unfortunately, when a dread becomes an obsession, it can also become a bore. bore, one could claim that Amis's book is a "ore, but it is difficult to see how anyone could claim that Grass's is not often one. As the same point is made over and over again, often in precisely the same manner, the reader is likely to find himself exclaim- ing: 'Yes, yes, I agree with every word you say, but I do wish you wouldn't go on and on saying it!' At the outset of the novel, the narrator ---- whom one assumes to be Grass himself ---- receives a rat as a Christmas present from his wife. In such circumstances, many husbands might find in an unwelcome gift a no less unwelcome symbolism. But Grass has wished for this rat — in the hope that it will Prod him into writing a poem about the education of the human race'. Posses-
sion of the rat leads to a number of erudite passages about rats in legend, rats in history, rats in medicine, rats in literature. We learn that, infinitely adaptable, rats can exist in both desert and permafrost; that such is their ability to survive every cataclysm that, having barred them from his ark, Noah was both astonished and appalled to see, as the floods receded, fresh rat-droppings on the land; that henceforth they became for man both a constant companion and a constant carrier of plagues. Inevitably, there is repeated discussion of the Pied Piper story. Did it originate, as Leibniz believed, in some children's crusade? Grass does not think so, producing his own theory of what really happened. Out of all this material, one can conceive of an interesting essay or even non-fiction book being written.
Uneasily sleeping, Grass dreams of his rat. Or is it, as she herself insists, the rat who dreams of him? In these dreams, many of them described with grim power, Grass is circling round and round the world in a space-capsule, looking down on a radioactive waste in which man has joined the dinosaurs as an extinct species, and rats are now the masters. Near the close of the book, Grass experiences what is both the most macabre and the most vivid of these dreams. From a Swedish laboratory, dedi- cated to genetic engineering, emerges a breed of rat-men, each the size of a three-year-old child, whom he calls now `Manippels' and now (there have been references to the Double Helix) 'Watson- Cricks'.
In his second obsession, with the ecolo- gy, Grass is shown persuading Oskar Mat- zerath, the hunchback dwarf hero of The Tin Drum, to make a silent, black-and- white video film about the destruction of the German forests. In this film, there appear such characters of fairy-tale as Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These passages imply that, if we destroy our forests, then we will also destroy all the mystery and magic that arises from them. Like Laurence Sterne (whose Tristram Shandy must, one guesses, have influenced him, as it has influenced so many German authors), Grass perpetually strays off one path to follow another and then another. So it is that the story of Matzerath and his film repeatedly leads to another story, in turn subjected to constant digressions, of how he returns to his native Danzig for the 107th birthday of his grandmother, of how he suffers from prostatitis, and of how, on his journey back to the Federal Republic, he has to be fitted with a catheter.
Another strand of the narrative deals with the voyages of a barge with a crew of five women, whose task it is to measure jelly-fish density in the Baltic. At one point (here the novel achieves the unearthly poetry that characterises the best of Grass's work), the women hear the song of the jelly-fish crowding around their vessel — `polychoral medusa song' overlaying the chugging of the throttled engines. At another point these women set off to explore a city buried beneath the ocean. At yet another, in Gotland, they join animal rights fanatics in smashing up a laboratory and freeing its captive animals. A separate strand of the novel slackly nooses an art forger called Malskat, whose supposedly mediaeval frescoes are disco- vered in the immediate aftermath of the war, just when Adenauer in West Ger- many and Ulbricht in East Germany are foisting their even more impudent forger- ies (as Grass sees them) on a divided nation. Malskat eventually confesses to his crimes, and most of his frescoes are then destroyed. Adenauer and Ulbricht never do so, and their work abides. The ferocious energy of this book is undeniable. To read it demands a compa- rable energy. It can best be compared to an ant-hill, in which the reader finds himself constantly lost, directionless, in one mur- ky, labyrinthine corridor after another.
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