Two Brothers by Ben Elton
(Bantam Press, R257)
This is the first in the Exclusive Books Recommends/new Boeke campaign that selects one book a month as the big prize among a number of recommended books.
This is new territory for Ben Elton, but, alas, the period he chooses to expose is one many of his readers would know intimately – World War II and, more specifically, the lives of two brothers incidentally (of course, not) born on the same day that Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party is formed.
In one of the many irritating devices, the party is then treated like a newborn baby as we follow its progress alongside that of the twin boys, step by step – painstakingly.
If you have not read anything on the Holocaust, this one will take you through all the horrors of that most awful time, but while telling an epic story Elton is also teaching a history lesson to explain exactly what was done when and where and how. How did Jewish people live in Berlin and what exactly did their lives become as Hitler’s bully boys were given carte blanche to treat them in any way they chose.
The book is dedicated to Heinze Ehrenberg, who served in the Wehrmacht, and Geoffrey Elton, who served in the British Army. They were cousins and the author’s uncles.
In the afterword, Elton explains that while Two Brothers is a work of fiction, it is inspired in part by his family circumstances. When you glance at this story, perhaps that’s the one that should have been told and could have been done with far more poignancy.
Because he feels he should make clear exactly what happened, Elton neglects his characters, who, in the telling of a complicated and finally convoluted story, remain nothing more than caricatures of that time and place. They are often expected to speak in a dialogue that sounds artificial for the time and to do things that don’t make much sense other than to serve the story he wants to tell.
But that has to be real and the people have to come alive before a story becomes more than a history lesson, one that too many of us know, in at least as much detail and told from many different angles throughout the years.
That’s why the real story would have made so much more sense. While the details of the story written are fascinating, it remains a story in which the characters are never fully explored.
How do two brothers make choices or is it as Elton suggests, purely the love of a woman that decided their lives – even at that tender age? If so, how did they grapple with their choices and how do you, as a Jew, step into the German army and start killing your own already beleaguered people?
How does your psyche cope with that? It is in the telling that Elton falters. He goes into great detail when telling the story, but the one he has chosen to highlight is so obvious that once you have the drama of his concocted family, it becomes quite clear exactly where he’s taking you.
So one doesn’t want to prolong the agony by giving a synopsis. At least you should read the book with as little knowledge as possible. That will allow you to play your own guessing game. There’s sadly not much more to the telling than just that.
It is a missed opportunity and, hopefully, having got this one off his chest, he can now turn to the true story – that of his family and how it affected the dynamics of those involved.
Because the point he turns to time and again throughout the 518 pages is how a war like this one – where specific people are targeted simply because of bloodlines – has an outcome on lives far beyond that in its immediate wake.
Don’t we know it!