Before and After

Far to Go by Alison Pick

Headline Review 2011

The List by Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books 2011

In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its writer. Since the focus is primarily on the claustrophobic world of the secret annexe where the Dutch Frank family and their friends hid from the Nazis, there is a constant tension with what we as readers know about events taking place in the world outside, and what will happen in the future. We understand that all the daily indignities, deprivations and fear Anne describes were in vain — the Franks would be discovered and deported to Bergen-Belsen.

The massive literature which has blossomed since the diary’s first publication in 1947 has told us what Anne could only speculate about — laying bare the monstrosities of the Holocaust in chilling detail. The shootings, starvings, gassings, burnings, beatings and torture, the unbearable suffering and unimaginable cruelty. But where do we go once horror and pity have been utterly exhausted? The next chapter, at least for some writers, is a move back to the kind of obliqueness achieved by Anne Frank. To the before and the afterwards, to the scars of the survivors, to the ripples cast outward and onward. Two recent novels tackle the events from opposite chronological directions — one starting with the prelude to the war, and the other the fall-out from it. It’s an oblique approach which, in the right hands, has the quiet power to disturb. Read more