Fiction: Detective Story By Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson Harvill Secker, 113pp. £12.99A bad guy tells his story - and it is some tale, not one anyone would boast all that loudly about. But then Antonio Martens, a policeman more than aware he was always more than an ordinary cop, was duly transferred from the regular police to the Corps.
It is his involvement with the secret police that brings him to where he is at the point at which Hungarian master Imre Kertész's wonderful novella opens, in prison or perhaps already dispatched to hell. It is not that clear, but then Kertész, the 2002 Nobel literature laureate and one of the most inspired originals at work today, regards ambivalence as the surest route to truth.
This is an astonishing performance, as terrifying as Kafka and as plausible.
By way of introduction, a lawyer who has acted for Martens - "I was appointed by the court as counsel for his defense" - announces that he had been entrusted with his client's manuscript. His client, Martens, makes no pretence at innocence; he has "freely, readily and uninhibitedly acknowledged his crimes as a matter of record - and with such stony indifference, it was as if he were giving an account of someone else's actions, not his own." Martens has left quite an impression on his lawyer, and will also impress the reader.
Although Detective Story does record the history of a particular crime, in detail, it is far more concerned with an ongoing crime - a state of corruption. As with Kertész's previous two books - Fatelessness, now entitled Fateless (1975; English translation 2004), and Liquidation (2003; English translation 2006), tone is all. Calm, conversational Martens, a man given to severe headaches, sets the scene. Somewhere in Latin America, in a country where "scummy Europe" is far distant, a coup has taken place, overthrowing a dictatorship, and now the people's judges are trying to clean up the mess created by the Corps.
Just as the depressed editor in Liquidation, a daring play within a novel, calmly went in search of a lost novel written by a famous writer-colleague who had survived Auschwitz only to later kill himself, Martens may as well be recounting a vacation he once went on. Relaxed and conversational, he recalls his colleagues: his boss Diaz - "the Diaz for whom an APB has been put out, though to no purpose" - and Rodriguez, a natural hit man with the eyes of a leopard. Much of the banter that passes between the men establishes their violent intentions.
The Corps had been busy spying; setting up surveillance teams, gathering informers, making life difficult for any liberal with a tendency towards independent opinions and not really taking orders from anyone else. In short, they have assumed authority and favour the most brutal methods of torture.
As already made clear, Martens is not interested in making excuses, but he does make clear that the specific crime, the double murder of an innocent father and son, was perpetrated when he was little more than the new boy in the Corps. The killings become more than symbolic. Federigo Salinas was a wealthy business man, and his son, Enrique, a depressed student. For Martens they become more than merely victims - the Salinas deaths constitute the end for Martens and the Corps - or perhaps only for the secret police in this particular guise.
Early in the narrative, a vital distinction between the law and power is made. When Martens, as the new boy, says "It's just - how should I put it - I mean, I actually thought we were serving the law here", Diaz corrects him and clarifies that they are in fact serving "those in power". While the interaction between Martens, Diaz and Rodriguez is funny, even jaunty, Kertész ensures that the reader does not forget that the population existing beyond the door of their office, a place known as "the operating theatre", are largely oblivious of the corruption, but for those who know, life is an ordeal.
One such individual living in dread is young Enrique Salinas. Depressed by the closure of the university, he had taken to moping about in existential despair. By allowing his diary to fall into the hands of Martens and co, Kertész makes effective use of it in fleshing out the character of the young student, a romantic who dabbles with notions of suicide until he falls in love. Alas, his romantic interest is insufficient to blind him to the reality that his peers are not willing to have a rich man's son join their circle.
The triumph of the narrative is that Martens is so convincing - at no time does he attempt to justify his activities. As for Enrique, here is a youth determined on having a mission.
His ambition to play his part and become involved is fulfilled by none other than his father. Again the characterisation is well handled and Tim Wilkinson not only catches the respective voices of Martens and of the young diary writer, he succeeds in obscuring the fact that this is a translation. Instead of reading as a polemic, Detective Story is a study in how events race out of control and settle into a thing called reality. It is far less ambitious than Liquidation, but this short, snappy little yarn possesses a terrifying universality. Martens, if far less sympathetic than the detached young Gyuri in Fatelessness, is as convincing. The time he spent reading the young man's journal has provided Martens with new insights.
Kertész has made the genre of metaphysical fiction his chosen territory.
Running parallel with the often comic office observations of Martens is the dark philosophising of the student: "I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: non existentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence." Just when it seems that Kertész is reaching towards a more sombre mood, Martens, ever the unlikely truth-teller, admits of that passage, "That, I have to confess, is a little over my head. I know nothing about philosophy. It may sound odd, but sometimes I have the same trouble with Enrique as I do with Diaz." From Enrique's diary entries, a sense of a society determined to ignore the political realities emerges. As the boy watches people eating and drinking, the disgruntled student decides: "With the greatest of pleasure I would have thrown a bomb among them." Through Enrique, the Corps discovers Ramon, a sinister, young, if gifted drifter and drug addict, who becomes very useful.
Throughout the narrative, the diary proves an invaluable device - it not only informs and assists Martens, it acts as a plausible way in which to discover the son's attitude towards his father. All the while, Martens is calmly leading the way towards the choreography of the killings referred to at the outset.
Imre Kertész was born in 1929 and not only survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he recalled it in Fatelessness as an adventure, not an ordeal. His account is unlike any concentration camp memoir - he has embraced the role of witness, not victim. This same originality defines Liquidation, a dazzlingly imaginative feat shaped by Beckett and Ionesco yet majestically original. Now with Detective Story, candid and as black as night, comes another remarkable, alluring performance. How these pages shimmer with irony and astute observation. In Martens we have a narrator who has had plenty of time to think, and if he is not repenting, it is because he knows this is how it happened, because he was there and knows it to be so.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
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