Jessie Neilson reviews an eloquent debut novel on the horrors of war.
MY OWN DEAR BROTHER
Holly Mueller
Bloomsbury Circus/Allen & Unwin
We open this story with a visit from the nightmarish Krampus: straight out of Austro-Bavarian folklore, these deathly frightening beasts careen into 8-year-old Ursula's home, marauding, overruling and threatening. Ursula never forgets the legacy of these mythical creatures because, while a subconscious threat, they echo the cruelty her world will soon experience.
Ursula Hildesheim, now 13, lives in the small village of Felddorf in fascist Austria with her mother, older sister, and her violent, psychologically disturbed brother, Anton.
It is 1944, men are mostly away fighting, Hitler Youth seeks to control all young people's thoughts and behaviours, terrifying those who do not comply, and, just out of sight, a concentration camp is operating at peak capacity.
Prisoners are mainly from the East: from the Red Army, plus a handful of Poles and Czechs. Malnourished, tortured humans are brought daily out of the camp to slave in the streets and the munitions factories.
Into this community enter, exit and meander various individuals who represent differing degrees of judgement, vindictiveness, faith or compassion.
Among these is Ursula's close friend, the ‘‘cretinous'' Schosi, for whom she is soon risking all as, while lives are precious, it takes only a whisper of malice here for these lives to end.
The pair cross into a world of the inhumane, where ‘‘silence filled the corridor like being underwater and the doors hid blank spaces containing unknown things, miserable creatures rather than children''.
While the first part of this book is needlessly arduous and wordy, with an overload of description and telling, it soon gains striking momentum.
We take an anguished dive into a place of intense and sickening abuse, which gains even more force because of its historical base.
Fascism's carefully controlled facade of order blazes down men who fall like deer "flushed out of the forest in culling season, how they buckled and flipped in the sweep of the wooden hunting towers''. And all too close to home, Ursula's brother lurches with his own dark ghosts.
Holly Mueller has Austrian and Welsh parentage and has taught creative writing at the University of South Wales. She is studying for her PhD and is a musician.
My Own Dear Brother is her eloquent and forceful debut novel.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
