ELEMENTS of the fairy tale at its most sinister feature in the Hungarian writer Agota Kristofs strange wartime fictions, which, though possibly influenced by the work of German fabulist Gunter Grass, are nevertheless chillingly original. Written in French and now published as a trilogy, The Book of Lies (Minerva, £8.99 in UK), consisting of The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier, 1986, Paris 1989, London, trans. Alan Sheridan), The Proof (La Preuve, 1988, Paris; 1991, London, trans. David Watson) and The Third Lie (Le Troisieme Mensonge, 1991, Paris; 1996 London, trans. Watson), is not only a powerful anti war fable, but also skilfully exposes the fragility of truth when it is faced by the horrors of reality. It also undermines the notion of the reliable narrator.
In The Notebook, the first and strongest novel, two young boys arrive at their grandmother's home. It is obvious the old woman and their mother are far from close; in fact, the grandmother is abusively hostile. But as war continues to devastate the Big Town, Grandmother's unedifying hovel has become a sanctuary of sorts. Straight out of the pages of Grimm, she is described with ruthless efficiency by her grandsons: "Her face is covered with wrinkles, brown spots and warts with hairs growing out of them. She has no teeth left, at least none that can be seen. Grandmother never washes. She wipes her mouth with the corner of her shawl when she has finished eating or drinking."
Her witch like appearance and uncouth manners are compounded by her violent temperament. However, the angelic looking brothers are more than a match for her. Their joint narrative is a deadpan, factual account of life with Granny. Somewhere in the course of it, the reader becomes aware that these eager little boyscouts, with their earnest talk of toughening exercises and self education, are dangerous survivors.
Small town gossip maintains that Grandmother poisoned her husband. In addition to her unwelcome relatives, she has another guest, an officer who is clearly some kind of benign pervert. Although the boys tell their story through selected episodes in which they usually feature, Kristof succeeds in creating a wider impression of a society at war. All the routine little kindnesses and meannesses are magnified. When the local pastor acquires a new young housekeeper, she bathes the boys and washes their clothes in exchanged for sexual titillation.
In contrast to the clinical detachment of the boys, the atmosphere around them is one of chaotic helplessness. Tempers are poised to erupt. A man tells a woman to shut up, adding: "Women have seen nothing of the war," to which she retorts: "Seen nothing? Silly bugger! We've all the work and all the worry: the children to feed and the wounded to look after. Once the war is over, you men are all heroes. The dead heroes. The maimed heroes. That's why you men invented war. It's your war, you wanted it ..."
Compared with the sustained emotionless tone of the joint narrative voice, this exchange is about the closest Kristof gets to sentimentality. The boys are not overly bothered about blowing up the nubile housekeeper. Nor do they react when their mother, having returned for them, new baby in tow, is shelled before their eyes. They merely bury her with the infant and confirm:
"Yes, the shell made a hole in the gardens"
When the boys later exhume the bodies and suspend the reassembled skeletons from the ceiling, it does seem as if Kristof is in danger of allowing black humour to obscure her central theme, which is the gradual dehumanisation caused by war. The boys have become little more than cunning monsters. By the close of this first book, as they witness their newly returned father being blown up while attempting to cross the frontier, they finally become able to separate from each other.
The Proof maintains Kristofs bleak, compressed style, but the joint narrative voice has now been replaced by third person narration. Lucas is the brother who stays on in the now dead Grandmother's house. When faced with an official assessments he helpfully suggests be described as an idiot ...if possible. I suffered a traumatic disorder. I'm not quite normal." Lucas moves through a succession of friendships; time passes, deaths and suicides occur, the war seems neither to continue nor end.
So laconic is the book that the reader is left asking whether it is absurd or profound, or possibly both, and whether Lucas is a saint or a villain, or, again, both. Much of the dialogue has a Beckettian ambiguity. The theme of children being abandoned is repeated when little Mathias is left by his mother. "The dead are nowhere and everywhere," says Lucas. Even the most shocking sequences are executed with remarkable understatement. Her authorial restraint renders Kristofs bizarre parable far more effective than most anti war novels.
"A book, no matter how sad, can never be as sad as a life," says Lucas early in The Third Lie. On returning to the town he once lived in, Lucas attempts to find his brother. Years have passed and many of the characters have died. Instead of the reunion he is hoping for, Lucas quickly discovers his brother does not want him. What is the true story?
If one were to draw a graph, the narrative twists of these allegorically political, nightmare novels about displacement and empty forms of survival would probably produce a close variation on the plots of the more frightening fairy tales. Kristof has written about a specific variety of evil we can understand: war and its aftermath.
Her fourth book, Yesterday, trans. David Watson (Secker, £9.99 in UK), first published in French two years ago, is a novella in which a disturbed narrator, again a victims of war as well as a grim childhood, tells how he murdered his mother's lover, the local teacher, who is also his father. The narrator's problems are further complicated bye his life long love of the teacher's daughter - his own sister. Now a married woman, the girl of his boyhood fantasies arrives at the factory where he works. A faltering romance is played out. Far slighter than the trilogy novels, Yesterday is, however, typical of her bleakly laconic style and again explores displacement.
Having left her native Hungary after the failed revolution of 1956, Kristof settled in Switzerland. These novels, coming as they do after so much upheaval has redrawn the political and geographical maps of what were Eastern and Central Europe, are powerful reminders of the fact that memory endures long after history has passes for solutions.
