Out from Under (Under the Frog - Tibor Fischer)

Member Name: duncantorr

Product:	Under the Frog - Tibor Fischer
Date:	31/10/06 (905 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Clever, compelling, funny, ultimately moving

Disadvantages: Occasionally too clever by half

Fifty years ago this week, the Hungarian uprising was being brutally suppressed. ____________________________________________



In Hungary "under a frog's arse down a coalmine" is a proverbially uncomfortable place to be, and a situation well worth avoiding.

It was, nevertheless, where the country figuratively found itself as World War Two drew to a close and the Soviets moved in to install a puppet dictatorship.

The dozen years between "liberation" by the Red Army and the heroic but ill-fated anti-Communist uprising of Autumn 1956 provide the backdrop for Tibor Fischer's first and best novel, Under The Frog. The foreground is occupied by Gyuri, a young semi-professional basketball player, his team-mates, friends and family as they duck and weave to survive, thrive where feasible and even skive and swyve, despite the onerous, odorous frog's arse overhead.

Gyuri and his friend Pataki are not initially active rebels. They resent the heavy, clumsy hand of communism and dream intermittently of escape to the West, but their everyday preoccupation is with having fun. Notionally employed by the Hungarian State Railways in order to preserve their "amateur" status, they tour the country drinking, gambling, chasing women and fooling around as happy-go-lucky young men might under any other regime anywhere. Pataki, the star of the team, as glib and quick-witted off-court as he is nimble and athletic on it, constantly cocks a snook at authority, but his rebelliousness is more a matter of personality than ideology.

Gyuri is only marginally more serious-minded. Weighed down in the official stakes by a dubious class background (his father, Elek, was a bookmaker before the war), he studies accountancy in a desultory way without any serious expectation that it will enhance his prospects of advancement. The system is too ponderous, impenetrable and arbitrary for that. Even his dreams of escape from Hungary are not motivated by material ambition. He would be content to be "a streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn't that fussy….Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn't need an examination in Marxism-Leninism, you wouldn't need to look at pictures of Rákosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately."

Even such a modest ambition as this, though, the reader can't quite imagine him fulfilling. Gyuri opts to stay behind when Pataki stows away on a freight train, hardly knowing whether it is heading west or east, after one of his antics threatens to land him in seriously hot water. However irksome the society in which Gyuri lives, however alarming his occasional brushes with the Hungarian secret police, the AVO, somehow one senses that his inertia and detachment are such that he will never bring himself to take decisive action. Life will never be quite bad enough for that. Instead, left to himself, he would mature into a mildly disgruntled middle age, complaining but still contriving to make the best of whatever fate threw his way.

But he is not left to himself. Two things happen: he meets and falls in love with Jadwiga, a resolutely anti-Communist student from Poland, while the ripples of unrest in Hungary suddenly swell into a wave of full-blown rebellion. From being a dissident in word and imagination only, he is swept up into the maelstrom, and unavoidably faced with acting out the reality.

*


Gyuri's story is recounted episodically. Each of Under The Frog's twelve chapters focuses on a particular month, opening with November 1955, flashing back to November 1944 and then jumping by stages forward again to the culmination of October/November 1956.

The episodic technique suits Fischer's narrative approach. It allows him to create a patchwork of anecdotes rather than to weave a continuous story, to work by allusion rather than detailed explanation, to pick up and drop minor characters without the reader fretting over untidy loose ends. The reader's imagination is required to do its share of the work, filling in the gaps and pulling the disjointed elements together. A knowledge of the historical background isn't essential but it doesn't half help.

Whether this will stimulate or irritate you depends on whether you like your reading-matter chunky with individually-flavoured ingredients or smoothly processed for easy digestion. Fischer caters for the former taste, and he caters for it in style. His fare is piquant and spicy. The language is sharp, original and often witty, so much so indeed that it sometimes comes across as self-conscious.

Striking phrases abound, to the extent that they sometimes jostle uncomfortably for space. Take this piece of characterisation: "Gyuri thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition was a handicap, as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made Gyuri realise that there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design."

Or this description of a visual distraction during an exam: "He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do up her blouse or the buttons didn't feel like working but light was taking off from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri's retinas." And so on for three more long sentences all on an unimportant detail. Imagination-stirring enough, but you never forget that you are reading and admiring the words rather than just absorbing their meaning.

Similarly the use of contrived noun-verbs - like "ozymandiased" or "frankensteined" - verges on the pretentious, detracting from the suspension of disbelief and thus from the reader's involvement in the story.

By contrast, the most moving moment of the whole story, as Gyuri and Jadwiga face the Russian tanks in Budapest, is told in one swift unornamented paragraph, a triumph of emotional understatement on a level with the closing passages of A Farewell to Arms.

Just one more quotation in case my selection so far has been too negative. Lest we forget that this is a very funny book as well as a very clever and ultimately very touching one, let me quote a little off-hand episode in which Gyuri, pursuing by phone some information essential to his job is impeded at every turn by bureaucratic obfuscation:

"Finally, he was connected to a voice whose hostility and reticence convinced him that he had at last reached the right person in the right department. 'You expect me to tell you this phone?' reiterated the irate voice. 'How do I know you're not an American spy?'

" 'Look at it this way,' said Gyuri, chewing over this epistemological doubt, 'would an American spy tell you to fuck your mother?' "

*


Under The Frog became an instant success on publication in 1992. Short-listed for the Booker and even winning one or two other prizes, it propelled Fischer to a prominent place in the contemporary literary pantheon, and ensured steady sales for his subsequent novels and short stories.

Technically impressive though these have been, in my view Under The Frog remains his best work to date. In Fischer's later books the wordplay too often smacks of being an end in itself, a jeu d'esprit, amusing but one-dimensional and lacking in real-life resonance. Nor are the characters in them as engaging and sympathetic as those in Under The Frog.

In Under The Frog, Fischer's wordplay and wit take on an extra edge from being embedded in a story of historical and personal significance. It is no secret that the story is based closely on the experiences of Fischer's own father, who escaped from Hungary to the West in 1956.

This provides both a counterpoint and an anchor. The casually comic passages sparkle all the more because the reality they describe is so serious and sombre. The brutal incompetence of the regime is all the more effectively exposed because the light cast on it is cast light-heartedly. Above all, Under The Frog rings true at a human level. One believes in the events and attitudes, knowing that this is how people must have to bear up under totalitarianism because no other approach to everyday life would be possible or tolerable.

By the same token, the development of Gyuri's character as the plot unfolds is wholly credible and entirely engages the reader's sympathy, sustaining interest and enabling one to skate over the odd literary over-indulgence as one hastens to read on towards the denouement. This is brilliantly brought to life and the ending, despite a self-conscious metaphor in the closing sentence, feels just right.

*


I was bowled over when I first read Under The Frog a few years ago. This was partly for personal reasons - the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was one of the first events to make an impact on my nascent political consciousness, and I later knew personally a survivor of the fighting in Budapest. Above all, though, it was because I was deeply impressed by the narrative style and verbal virtuosity.

Re-reading it for the purposes of this review, and having read Fischer's other books in the meantime, I'm still impressed, but perhaps less so now than then. I'm not sure why this is: perhaps because I now take the virtuosity for granted, even to the point where it begins to grate a little; perhaps because I have found the later books relatively disappointing and therefore view the first with a more critical hindsight; perhaps simply because it no longer surprises as it did the first time round.

If you haven't read Fischer, though, let me urge you to do so, and to read Under The Frog as a priority. It's a brilliant, funny, moving and relevant book. I only hope Fischer will recapture the ability to be moving and relevant - as well as brilliant and funny - in the future.


Under The Frog by Tibor Fischer is published in paperback, price £6.99 in the UK, by Random House's Vintage imprint, ISBN 0-099-43805-4.




© First published on Ciao UK under the name torr, December 15th 2004

Summary: A brilliant, though sometimes too self-consciously brilliant, book