A Brechtian take on Brecht

Fiction: Berlin 1948. After 15 years in exile, revolutionary dramatist and inspired lyric poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) returns to a chastened Germany.

It is a muted homecoming. But then Brecht, for all his genius, was never the easiest of individuals. Jacques-Pierre Amette takes the facts and places them in a narrative that acquires the weight of compelling psychological drama. The known history never interferes with Brecht's Lover developing into an outstanding, coolly offbeat European novel that holds the reader from the first sentence until its sombre, understated close.

Instead of the factual material swamping the narrative and reducing it to documentary, or faction, as so often happens with novels drawing on real-life events, the use of history adds to the texture, which is why Amette deservedly won the 2003 Prix Goncourt for what is an unusual, episodic and complex study of an artist and his society. Here is a contemporary French novel that is neither emotionally overwrought nor strangled by its own intellectual self-regard. It is a revelation. Andrew Brown's subtle translation sustains the narrative tone, which succeeds in appearing intrigued without becoming voyeuristic or knowing. It is that rare achievement, a novel in which information - Amette has an extensive knowledge of the life and work of Brecht - and imagination complement each other.

Amette's approach is highly observational, true to Brecht's own theory of theatre as an observed experience, not one of involvement. The prose is descriptive, formal and precise, yet impressionistic, full of nuance, ever alert to the realities of lives being shaped by outside forces. Amette, who is also a playwright and critic, avoids climbing into the minds of his characters, while somehow allowing us to share their thoughts, or at least perceptions. These troubled players gesture, sigh and react, leaving us to decide their respective moods. The resulting characterisation is skilful, convincing and original.

A postwar atmosphere of defiant defeat is immediately established, that of Brecht's as well as Germany's. After all, Brecht had left the US having appeared before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, whose chairman had praised him for his "co-operation" and - refused permission by the Allies to enter West Germany - had accepted the offer of a theatre from the East Germans.

Amette describes Brecht's return: "For a long time he gazed out at the forests and their russet colours slipping past . . . An armoured truck was rusting in a ditch."

The main characters are introduced as if walking on stage to perform in one of Brecht's works. Helene Weigel, his long-suffering wife, stands, "smiling and inflexible". The enigma of the great man is caught from the start: "Everyone seemed rather awed by Brecht, this round-faced man, with his hair combed forward like a Roman emperor's."

In the space of one short paragraph, 15 years of German history is brilliantly distilled through the eyes of Brecht as he enters Berlin and surveys the changed scene. "He had left German soil on 28th February 1933. At that time there were banners and swastikas in all the streets . . . Today was 22nd October 1948. Fifteen harsh years had passed. Today, the official cars sped along, overtaking Soviet lorries and the few, shabbily dressed pedestrians." The dramatist is pictured gazing at the ruins of the city. "There was a vast silence, patches of white wall, blackened windows, countless buildings in a state of collapse."

Amette never sentimentalises Brecht; he keeps his distance but also evokes a man no longer young, and obviously ailing. Brecht had a serious heart condition and existed in a fragile present, undercut by vivid memories of the past and other lovers. He is alert, if distracted and inclined towards old habits, such as bedding each new actress, ever confident of his wife's tetchy tolerance. Brecht wrestles with both his idealistic dreams and his cynicism. The great man's sexual appetite provides the secret police with the perfect means of spying on him and assessing the extent of his communist leaning - after all, Brecht never did join the party.

Into this shaky world of a new theatre attempting to offer a cultural distraction to a political defeat comes Maria Eich, a talented Viennese actress with her own problems in the form of a disgraced father and husband. Her young daughter lives elsewhere with Eich's mother.

Maria's fatalistic acceptance of the boorish Brecht as a lover is perfectly pitched. It is a world of compromise, tense and uncertain. Eich is reduced to a passive bed-mate, watched as closely by Brecht's wife as she in turn watches Brecht. For him, the young actress seems "deprived of destiny", as if she "lived one single, eternal day". He considers her in the light of "that single monotonous day in which she had been living ever since her adolescence."

It is a remarkable if reductive reading by one person of another. Moments such as this occur throughout the book. Maria slowly dissolves because her sense of self has been removed from her. As with Brecht, Amette never sentimentalises her and retains an authorial distance, yet she is believable as a figure drifting through days filled by tiny routines. Later, she picks up the master's eyeglasses as he sleeps, and "looks through the lenses, secretly nursing the idea that she will see with the eyes of genius."

Another character, Hans Trow, the repressed secret policeman to whom Maria reports, is sensitively drawn as a man who never quite recovered from his own childhood spent watching a silent father. "It was exactly as if the gothic brickwork of the libraries had made him mute, melancholy with a bottomless melancholia . . . Hans remembered his father's long silences, sometimes solemn, at other times sombre, as if they were a way of rebuking the family for its existence."

Inevitably, Maria outlives her usefulness as a spy. Change and regret emerge as the enduring themes of this layered narrative. Maria's desires are never fulfilled and she fades and dissolves into what is best described as safety. "Perhaps she hadn't been able to understand Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble . . .?"

Amette confers a palpable sense of waiting on the story; his characters wait for different things. Late in the book, Maria, now transposed into a very different set of routines, ponders all that has happened. The effect is that of life as a succession of hours, as a sequence of events. Maria asks herself many things, most particularly, "would she one day be able to justify herself for having spied on Brecht?"

But did she really spy on him? Situations, choices, compromise and missed opportunities - Brecht's Lover is about many things. Seldom has a novel so intelligently balanced information and speculation with such humanity.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Brecht's Lover By Jacques-Pierre Amette Translated by Andrew Brown Hesperus Press, 228pp. £12.99