978 The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes (read 17 Nov 1968) I found this a searing read. Wikpedia's article on Hughes says :"His most important work is perhaps the trilogy The Human Predicament, of which only the first two volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; twelve chapters, under 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these he follows the course of European history from the 1920s through the Second World War, including real characters and events — such as Hitler's escape following the abortive Munich putsch— as well as fictional." ( )

An English novel set in the period between the world wars, the book follows a young, naive member of the English gentry from his Welsh countryside manor through his journeys to visit distant cousins in Germany. We also get a very close-up view of the political turmoils of Germany during the early 20s, as the narrative switches around quite a bit. The whole story is really an allegory for the relative states of awareness of the English and German societies during the period. Our English hero is entirely ignorant of the politic unrest going on in Germany, believing it to be a passified and now peaceful place. It's hard for me to be wholly drawn into a story where the protagonist is almost entirely and in every possible way, clueless. Still the book was quite interesting to read, and did definitely hold my attention.

Here's a passage near the end of the book, as the protagonist gazes upon a mostly frozen Danube River, that gives an idea of the metaphorical thrust of the narrative, as river and ice stand in for pre-WW II Germany:

"The road to the station took Augustine close to the river itself. Even now the river was not everywhere frozen: here and there where the current was strongest there were still patches of dark grey water that steamed in the sun, so that the solitary swan indefatigably swimming there was half-hidden in vapour. But elsewhere the Danube seemed to be frozen solid in heaps. It was wild, yet utterly still. Huge blocks of ice had jostled each other and climbed on top of each other like elephants rutting and then got frozen in towering lumps: or had swirled over and over before coagulating till they were curled like a Chinese sea. None of them had remained in the place where first it had frozen: each block was complete in itself but now out of place--like a jig-saw puzzle glued in a heap helter-skelter so that now it could never be solved.

It was all such a muddle! Although it was utterly still it expressed such terrific force it was frightening: the force that had made it--thrusting flows weighing hundreds of tons high into the air, and the force it would release when it thawed. When that ice melted at last it would go thundering down the river grinding to bits everything in its path. No bridge could possibly stand up to it. The longer you looked at its stillness, the greater your feeling of panic...Augustine hated Germany: all he wanted now was to get away as quick as he could."