Dirty Doctor (Snowleg - Nicholas Shakespeare)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Snowleg - Nicholas Shakespeare
Date:	21/11/05 (157 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good insight into a foreign country

Disadvantages: major flaws in the plot

Shakespeare? I didn’t know that the surname still existed, but as nothing is made of it on the cover, I assume that Nicolas is no offspring of William’s. Anyway, the author’s name was not the reason why I bought the book, I decided to read it because it’s mostly set in Germany, parts of it in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) and it interests me how foreigners see my country, if they understand it, if they’ve done their homework and researched thoroughly or if they’ve put their foot in.

When Peter Hithersay, a public-school boy obsessed with Arthurian legend (his sister calls him Bedevere) is sixteen years old, he gets a birthday ‘present’ from his mother that upturns his old life and determines his future one, she tells him that his Dad is not his biological father, his biological father is an escaped East German political prisoner with whom she spent a night when she was in Leipzig as a young woman on a tour as a classical singer. She only knows his name, Peter, and that he used to be a doctor.

After finishing school Peter leaves England and his family and moves to Hamburg to study medicine and to find out who he is. It’s not possible for ordinary travellers to visit the GDR then – the year is 1980 – but one day a friend of his asks him if he wants to substitute the technician in his theatre troupe which has been invited officially for four days to perform in Leipzig during the Trade Fair. Peter jumps at the chance and is indeed able to visit the place where his parents spent the night together. This visit, however, doesn’t have much impact on him, what can/should he feel standing in front of the house where he was conceived?

He’s more impressed by a girl he meets in Leipzig, she only tells him the Icelandic nickname, Snjólaug (which sounds to his English ears like Snowleg) by which her grandmother calls her; they fall for each other and spend a night together in her family’s garden shed. When she tells him that she’d like to flee the GDR clandestinely, he promises to help her, but when the decisive moment comes, he panics and denies her.

Back in West Germany he fully realises what he’s done and we watch him during the following twenty years trying to cope with this act of cowardice and torturing himself with remorse. He becomes a workaholic, a drug addict, a randy womaniser laying every nurse he can get his hands on but never has a stable relationship. OK, the author wants to show us that Peter is emotionally barren, that his shame has turned into an obsession, I can’t help feeling, however, that he wrote this part of the novel also with the motto “sex sells” in mind. The women Peter meets are interchangeable, their characters contribute nothing to the story proper, had Peter met different women, it would have been just as well.

Although The Wall has been down for some years, Peter doesn’t venture to the East again until he’s forty years old. When one of his patients dies, he takes some days off and her ashes to her granddaughter living near Leipzig who couldn’t come to the cremation. This journey takes him back to the places where he spent the fateful time with Snowleg, he meets people who knew her then and at last he succeeds in laying the ghosts that haunted him to rest.

The positive aspects: As someone born and raised in the GDR (and later a frequent visitor) I can say that Shakespeare has done phenomenal research work, he really catches the spirit, the atmosphere, the physical aspects of this now former state up to the dot on the ‘i’ (as I’d say in German): from the activity of the Stasi, the secret police, over the drabness and the soot in the towns up to the people and their habits - one of which is to look out of the windows, elbows on a cushion, and watch the street and the neighbours - oh yes, I did that, too, with my grandfather, little me standing on a stool! All this is genuine, hats off to diligent Mr Shakespeare, I can’t find any flaws here nor in his description of West Germany. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book he thanks two German institutions where he could work, he also mentions 18 German friends who helped him.

The negative aspects: For each detail contributing to the atmospheric description there’s at least one that doesn’t, I see the author looking at his drawer crammed full with descriptions of things, similes and metaphors thinking, “I’ll get you in, just you wait!” Two examples: “By the stubborn window was a round pedestal table and a pair of cane-bottomed chairs to which she had added identical covers, tapestried each with the outline of a sleeping cat.” . . . “Peter settled back into the corner of the taxi, the better to avoid its tart smell that reminded him of the innards of the fridge he had bought in a Christmas sale.” --- See what I mean?

But that’s not all, on the one hand Dr. Peter Hithersay is an intelligent man, on the other hand he’s also inconceivably dumb for the sake of the plot, if he weren’t, the story couldn’t develop the way it does. The novel has 386 pages, I maintain that a reader with average intelligence knows on page 200 what’s what, the main protagonist doesn’t up to the last page.

The main flaw is yet to come, though, in Germany an urn with the ashes of a deceased person is NEVER given to anyone, it is against the law. I should know, my mother was cremated in the town where she lived during her last years but the urn was buried in the town where she grew up, it was sent there by post organised by the crematorium. This was in 1996, the novel ‘Snowleg’ was published in 2004, I didn’t think that the law had changed but I wanted to be sure and called the local crematorium, it hasn’t. (the things one does for a book review!)

Chance would have it that the book I read next was Graham Greene’s ‘Travels With My Aunt’ which starts with the protagonist taking the urn with his mother’s ashes home with him in order to put it among the dahlias in his garden. From this I gather that it can be done in GB and that Shakespeare possibly never thought of researching if it was also possible in Germany. But why didn’t his 18 German friends point it out to him? What makes this flaw so scandalous is the fact that the urn thing is vital for the plot, had the author got it right, there would be no plot.

So off with the book into the bin? Well, no, I haven’t thrown the book away at once; ‘Snowleg’ is a realistic novel, but we can be generous and take the transportation of the urn as a fairy tale element, especially as non-German readers will hardly stumble over it (the peeps who longlisted the novel for the MAN Booker prize certainly didn’t), the parts dealing with the GDR and the love story as such are still good enough to save the novel from immediate destruction. I’ve decided to give it to a friend who grew up in Leipzig and can recognise even more than I can as a birthday present; I won’t influence him, shouldn’t he notice anything odd urn-wise, I’ll come back and give the book another star!

Vintage
386 pages
published 2004
cover price 7.99 GBP


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Summary: an English/German love story with flaws