Surreal Oxford junketings
Anita Brookner
DR GRUBER'S DAUGHTER by Janice Elliott
Hodder & Stoughton, f9.95
This slim novel contains a plot so voluminous that it would have furnished a good 400 pages had a more dogged writer had the wit to invest it in something intentionally serious. As it is, it sits uneasi- ly at the heart of a confection that prefers to think of itself as a fable and adopts a lighthearted, even superficial, tone to suit its resolute decision to skim the surface. It has to be said that this tone is remarkably unified, although it manages to incorporate hints of Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon without in any way reflecting the stoicism of the one or the fury of the other.
If you can imagine the aged Adolf Hitler holed up in an attic in North Oxford (and he has been treated as a personnage de roman before this by Beryl Bainbridge) you will have no difficulty in accepting his ultimate demise in Coronation year, just as Gloriana's barge sinks with all hands in' what must be the Cherwell and midsum- mer madness parts and reunites all the characters in a final masque which is allowed equal time with Hitler's long de- layed disappearance.
If, further, you can accept that Hitler and his daughter (yes, he has a daughter) exist less in the body, as material forms, than in the mind, that they in fact exist as incarnations or emanations of evil, as Satan once did, then their presence in North Oxford and their eventual mutation will seem less worrying and less anomalous than they might otherwise appear to read- ers of a more sensitive historical disposi- tion. When last glimpsed, Vera Gruber, daughter of Hitler by his niece Angela Raubal, was seen entering the Convent of the Little Flowers of St Anne and volun- teering for service in Vietnam.
The strong woman of the novel, howev- er, is not Dr Gruber's daughter, for all her demonic powers, but use Lamprey, who acquired her house in North Oxford with mysteriously obtained money. She presides over a collection of refugees, all of them stateless and passed on to her through the agency of Gottlieb, an antiquarian book- seller who plies his trade conveniently near Victoria Station. The household contains one English woman, Elenora Flitch, a Chaucer specialist of virginal appearance and disposition, and a variety of more colourful, or at least more resourceful characters disposed around Elenora's ground floor and Gruber's attic: Babakov in the basement, Countess Rakosfalvi and Janusz Grzyb on the first floor, and use Lamprey above all, chairbound, bewigged, focussing her opera glasses on the nearby convent, and theoretically writing a novel on her portable typewriter.
Across the road is the household of Professor Gustavus Mowle (these funny names could have been avoided), his wife Valerie, their dog Cuffy, Valerie's phan- tom pregnancy, and her empathetic ac- quaintance with Queen Elizabeth II, al- ways ready to drop in and confide her weariness with the prospect of the Corona- tion, always ready for another of Valerie's fairy cakes, although she knows that Mr Hartnell will scold her if she adds another millimetre to what the author cruelly de- scribes as her overweight figure. It has to be said that Janice Elliott frequently does duty for the rude child buried somewhere in all of us, particularly when detailing Miss Flitch's attacks of the vapours, during which coarse and lewd thoughts rise to the surface. These thoughts are eventually transformed into action when a student named Derrick Sproke comes to read her his essay on the Wife of Bath and is not allowed to leave until the early hours of the following morning. This subplot is negligi- ble and more than a little tasteless, particu- larly when collated with the story of Gruber's or Hitler's residence in the attic of 161 Radpole Road and the events that bring his continued existence to light.
He has been seen, of course, notably by Countess Rakosfalvi, who sells her di- amonds to the butcher for meat which she prepared for his dinner, until he informs her that he is a vegetarian. He has also been seen by Detective Sergeant Rainbird, who has to be removed by Special Branch and sent to a rehabilitation centre in case his sensational declarations should clash with the Coronation. He has been found, moreover, by his witch-like daughter, Vera, who has inherited all his evil propen- sities and turned them to more feminine ends: she combines a gift for creative housework with a desire to kill cats, and she is after Dr Gruber's gold, the gold that he brought out of the bunker and was forced to share with Ilse Lamprey and Babakov as they hurried him through the subway tracks below the Wilhelmsplatz, through the Russian lines, to a hazardous form of survival. Babakov carried the suitcase full of gold, some of which was eventually used to purchase the house in Radpole Road. Gruber is suffering from retrograde amnesia and may therefore in a certain sense be said to be innocent. It is only when he interrupts one of the Coun- tess's little parties to complain of the noise and inform them that his patience is exhausted that his existence is revealed to the full cast of characters. What they do with the information is perhaps the cleverest part of the book.
Those who take their knowledge serious- ly have to be punished, for seriousness is out of order in Coronation year, when the university is mounting its own river pageant with Miss Flitch as Gloriana. There is a good deal of fairly grotesque pairing off, of a floundering and perfunc- tory nature. That disposes of the English characters, always regarded with a sceptic- al, albeit partial, eye by the author. The Detedive Sergeant has been rendered free of all memory through the agency of the State's psychiatric services. The Hungarian Countess continues to cultivate her garden, the Pole, who in any event understands no English, finds happiness with one of Miss Hitch's students, and it is left to the survivor, Ilse Lamprey, to tap out on her portable typewriter the history of her meeting with Gruber and Babakov.
This is very well done. The irritations of the action subside to reveal the original plot which has been too easily overlaid with farce, much of it conveyed in short paragraphs of Weldonian length and subst- ance. And the reader is at last allowed access to a grown-up world which might have seemed to be in danger of more or less total eclipse. Whether the grown-up world is more palatable than the world of surreal university junketings is something that same reader will have to decide. It is above all the sheer embarrassment of certain historical events and their irruption into normal peacetime concerns with which Janice Elliott seeks to tease us. I finished the book with considerable admiration for her insight, an admiration that contrived almost to dismiss my earlier impatience with her levity.
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