Confession with Blue Horses
The unusual title refers to a painting which hung in the narrator’s childhood home. The book might better have been called Gone with the Wind, except that Margaret Mitchell has already taken the title. It has much in common with Mitchell’s book, in content if not in style. They both concern a social order which vanished in the narrator’s lifetime, a regime which once seemed so powerful and permanent and which did not shift or evolve but simply blew away.
The narrator is a woman who grows up in East Germany and moves to England after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She returns 20 years later to search for her younger brother, who was taken from the family after a failed attempt to escape to the West. The story is told in two time streams, Then and Now. This is a common device, but few novelists interweave them so deftly.
The Then stream wraps us in the fog of suspicion which blanketed East Germany, as everybody spied on everybody else to prove their loyalty to a paranoid state. The Now stream steeps us in the sense of alienation one gets on returning to a place one once knew so well and is now so changed, as if one were a living ghost. It also includes a visit to the astonishing project undertaken by the German archives service to paste together the huge mass of shredded files left behind by the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Don’t let the title deter you from a wonderful book which explores dilemmas most of us have fortunately never had to face.
