The devil's own luck

Fiction:Friendship, and far more importantly, the complexities of honour, a sensation experienced by many if understood by relatively few, dominate the extraordinary narrative that is the ninth novel, and finest to date, by South African Justin Cartwright.

Here is an outstanding, atmospheric book that will initially surprise and preoccupy the imagination, before settling down to haunt it. It concerns the doomed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Exactly why the dictator had the devil's own luck to survive the events of July 20th, 1944, when German war hero Col Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg undertook to free Germany and the world, remains one of history's most horrible jokes. Cartwright - author of Interior (1988), In Every Face I Meet (1995), Leading the Cheers (1998), White Lightning (2002) and The Promise of Happiness (2006) - is a subtle, seriously underrated, though award-winning, writer, caught between South African and British fiction. He has taken the facts and fashioned an episodic story of conventional dramatic narrative, letters, historical reconstruction and re-imaginings, that makes full study of human nature, its many failures and its sudden acts of courage and endless regrets. The closeness between friends and the secrets that persist despite those bonds is the initial inspiration. Conrad Senior, an Oxford graduate, is 35, not quite employed, not quite happily married to his increasingly exasperated doctor wife, and overpowered by a burden imposed upon him by a former professor. This don, famous and now dead, had selected Senior as the most suitable candidate for a task that must be done - the setting down of the truths about an Oxford friendship that endured between the professor and a German aristocrat who set out to free his country. Yet at the moment of crisis, when that friendship was tested, one friend failed the other.

Humanity rather than outstanding academic prowess has placed Senior in his position as trusted messenger burdened with belatedly correcting a wrong.

After his death, the old professor, EA Mendel, a character based on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, decides to entrust a complex bequest, more an imposition, on his former student. "Dear Conrad, I leave you my papers and my letters relating to Axel von Gottberg," begins Mendel's letter. "You may be surprised: you may even wonder what to do with them. It is true you were not my most brilliant student; but I think, my dear boy, that you are the most human." Mendel then refers to his having taken "a position against Axel", a fact that was known, but he then adds: "perhaps you don't know that many people blamed me in some way for his death. It has been a terrible burden to live with."

IT IS POSSIBLE to imagine Conrad Senior reeling under the full impact of the professor's candour, delivered from beyond the grave. Mendel was known to have warned the Allies about his friend's intention to "save Germany". Mendel's guilt about having failed a friend is central to the book. As for Conrad, in him Cartwright has created a three-dimensional character who exists at the mercy of multiple layers of chaos. Early in the narrative, written largely from Conrad's viewpoint, in a precise if conversational third person, the reader is given some sense of the state of his mind. "I am troubled by the accumulation of thoughts, particularly by the half-dead aspects of them, like leaves in autumn, still there in outline but lacking life, Conrad thinks. In my thirty-sixth year they seem already to be piling up and I see no way of disposing of them."

His "human qualities" are not proving much help to his wife, who, despairing of his preoccupation with a project too vague for her scientist's mind, has decided to leave him for an older colleague. Likeable, somewhat battered Conrad is a dreamer and a thinker, he is susceptible to information, impulses and impressions and is very credible. He lounges in his filthy flat above a noisy bakery manned by Tony, who is fascinated by the ongoing drama upstairs and is content to provide bread and verbal support. Against the background of what remains the biggest story of the 20th century, Cartwright, in his finest novel, sets up a clever tension between his central character's messy present-day personal life - including his inability to tidy the flat for a quick sale - and the other lives, lived some 60 years earlier.

His own past is not that straightforward either. Senior is a South African, and former Rhodes scholar, who settled in England after his father dismissed him. The old man had his problems too, having been disgraced in South Africa, and his shame had caused him to reject his son. Conrad Senior's private freefall makes it easier to understand his ability to become obsessed with someone else's ancient failure. Mendel lived on to old age, ever aware of having failed a friend who loved him. This regret gives Senior more than a project, it gives him a purpose - all of which Cartwright handles convincingly.

BEYOND THIS LIES the story of a small group, composed mostly of Prussian, privileged sons of an older Germany, who set out to destroy Hitler.

Cartwright makes inspired use of the material, particularly the real-life friendship between Isaiah Berlin, a Jew, and Adam von Trott, the aristocrat upon whom Cartwright's von Gottberg is based. Von Trott was among the conspirators hanged for their involvement in the assassination attempt. All the lordly values of a landowning class were pitched against the brash megalomania of Hitler's Reich. Von Stauffenberg came complete with impeccable credentials and a distinguished service record under Rommel. It was Von Stauffenberg who carried the bomb into the meeting with the express intention of killing Hitler.

History testifies to the fact that it all went horribly wrong. The conspirators were butchered and their deaths were filmed on Hitler's orders.

Many of the facts will be familiar to anyone with an interest in history. The Song Before It Is Sung is yet further evidence, if any were needed, of the ongoing resonance of the second World War. Mendel, of course, is a displaced Jew, and even in this, there is the contrast between his culture and that of his friend, Axel von Gottberg, a Prussian baron with a lofty notion of what it means to be German. Cartwright writes plain, elegant, descriptive prose.

He is also very good at characterisation and, above all, dialogue. The idealistic exchanges between Mendel and Axel convince as those once spoken by two young men living in difficult times. Equally, the vicious confusion experienced by Senior and his wife are articulated in their authentically embittered banter.

Then there is the character of Elizabeth Partridge, first encountered as a bored young wife in 1930s Jerusalem with her cousin. Both "gels" met up with Mendel and Axel there. It marks the beginning of complicated relationships involving all four, and dominated by Axel's mercurial and rampaging charm.

Cartwright handles the period sequences adroitly. This is material that could have flagged into contrived and over-stated mawkishness in the hands of a William Boyd, or might have lost its sharpness had Anthony Burgess unleashed his vaudevillian humour. Instead Cartwright sustains the tone and the irony as the action moves between London and Berlin, the past and the present, as a wise and witty ancient old woman, the only survivor, Elizabeth, re-enters the story, supplying some additional, but not too much, information.

In his sympathetic responses to her, Conrad Senior yet again demonstrates his "human qualities". By the close of the novel, Senior has proved a more than able researcher.

CARTWRIGHT, WHO CARRIES his own research lightly, never reduces Conrad Senior to a mere detective. Instead he has allowed him to engage in a layered quest. Novelists have repeatedly returned to the horrors of the second World War. It is the big story, and has produced great novels as well as lesser, opportunistic ones. Time and again throughout this inspired, obvious Booker frontrunner of time shifts and revelations and individuals attempting to make sense of their lives, Cartwright makes the reader pause, gasp and wonder. This is what great fiction should do, and it certainly does here.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Song Before It Is Sung By Justin Cartwright Bloomsbury, 276pp. £16.99