Rhine Journey (eBook)

A GERMAN SUMMER is a quick, shimmering, lively thing. The winter is often so long and grey that, by April, one begins to despair, to believe that the gloom may in fact be permanent, that the sun might never find the energy to rouse itself for more than a few grim hours before it falls back weakly below the horizon once more. But when spring does at last arrive, it’s with a thunderclap, operatically large and wild and loud, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the great eternal genius of nature. The landscape that had been so leaden and dour goes green nearly overnight, the sun gathers its courage and shines down, and in human hearts the heaviness of those long, cold months begins to lift and lighten.

In Ann Schlee’s first novel for adults, Rhine Journey, Charlotte Morrison’s story is that of a German awakening. As befits our meek, unmarried middle-aged English protagonist in the year 1851, Charlotte’s revolution is less external than it is internal; not a physical blooming into flower, but a subtle and total derangement of understanding. Charlotte is accompanying her brother, the stern and pious Reverend Charles Morrison; his poisonously passive-aggressive, beautiful, and sickly wife Marion; and their teenaged daughter Ellie on a voyage down the Rhine. Charlotte has just recently come into some money: for twenty years she was the housekeeper to one Mr Ransome at Ditchbourne, and he left her a small fortune in his will. Now she is financially independent for the first time in her life, though still without an occupation or a place to live when she returns home to England. In Germany, she finds herself expected to act as something a little less than a family member and a little more than a servant, the minder of her brother’s baggage in public, Ellie’s companion and governess, and Marion’s lady’s maid. If Charlotte does not baulk at this humbling expectation, it’s because she is so out of practice in seeing herself as anyone’s equal that she welcomes service as her due.

The book opens as the family arrives in Coblenz. At the moment the boat docks, Charlotte sees a man whose face sends a terrible jolt of pain to her heart. She has mistaken him for someone she loved when she was very young; a miller named Desmond Fermer, whom her family felt was too far below her to agree to their marriage. She knows this stranger is not her former love – he is close to her own age, and Fermer would by now be in his sixties – but when, to her dismay, this man, Edward Newman, and his family begin to show up at the same hotels and restaurants as the Morrisons, and they strike up an acquaintance, Charlotte can’t help from seeing him dually, both as himself and as the love she lost. The echo of Charlotte’s ill-fated love affair gives rise to an onslaught of memories. The sensitive nerves of girlhood reawaken, and she feels an ache she can’t soothe away. She remembers most vividly a moment when, in the terrifying, exhilarating first transport of her love long ago, in lieu of Fermer, she kissed the large soft face of a blooming peony:

This passage is so true to the experience of the deep wild emotion of adolescence that I felt, upon encountering it, a jolt of nostalgia. Who among us, once so very young and trembling with new love, hasn’t kissed something soft and beautiful and safe, instead of the far more terrifying and longed-for lips of the beloved?

The writing in Rhine Journey is always taut and wonderful like this, never showy, gesturing clearly to Charlotte’s emotional pitch even when she can’t quite understand it herself. When, late in the book, in a great boil of dismay and anger, she leaves her family and the Newmans at a beer garden in the evening and walks fast to get away from them, Schlee’s language takes on the urgency of Charlotte’s internal state:

Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but, to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee replicates the customs, language, and atmosphere of 1851, hewing so closely to the feeling that a book written in the early Victorian era stirs in the reader that, upon learning that Rhine Journey was only first published in 1980, I did a double take. This cannot be true; this book cannot possibly be by a contemporary writer!, I insisted, even while discovering that Schlee herself was not even born until 1934, and that the novel was in fact a finalist for the 1981 Booker Prize. She followed it, two years later, with another atmospheric feat of careful historical ventriloquy in The Proprietor, the story of the idealistic owner of a small group of islands off the south coast of England in 1836, beset and broken by his own idealism and his romantic longings.

Historical fiction is always a complicated negotiation between the present from which the writer is writing and the past that is being imagined on the page. Writers bridge the divide by either implicitly or explicitly acknowledging the present – whether through a winking, postmodern pastiche, or a more earnest animation of a distant era that informs or reflects the present (or vice versa) – or by ignoring it completely. Schlee boldly chooses to ignore the present, staying so faithful to the mindset and vocabularies of the people of the mid-nineteenth century that she entirely erases the idea of the modern world from the experience of the book. She effects this with incredible subtlety, not only through the many small choices she makes – the flowing Victorian grammar; the more decorum-bound emotional landscapes of her characters; the small, slightly alien details of clothing or transportation – but also in what she chooses to leave out. The things, that is, that her characters don’t notice, but that a century or more later we certainly would, because they would be so very alien to our experience. This lack of explication forms small vacuums of consciousness, uncannily replicating the same small vacuums of consciousness that appear in texts that were written during eras that the long passage of time has since made strange.

For instance, the year in which Rhine Journey takes place, 1851, is extremely important to the story, deepening the narrative stakes, but Schlee traces it so gently that the reader might not be initially aware of the resultant underlying tensions. Three years before the book is set, in 1848, there had been a great social uprising in Paris called the February Revolution, leading to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe of France; the republican fervour spread across Europe and into the many fragmented German states of the time, including Prussia. There, King Frederick Wilhelm IV, under pressure of civil unrest, agreed to reorganise his government and push to add his kingdom to the larger German state. His army, however, fearing riots, clashed with protestors on 13 March in Berlin, and the resulting day-long fight left hundreds dead. In the aftermath, the King’s verbal agreement to expand the people’s liberties was retracted, and many freedoms were curtailed, particularly those of Communist and Workers’ Party members who had been the most vocal; this included Karl Marx, who had to flee from Cologne and later settle in London. By 1851, Frederick Wilhelm IV had intensified the attack on the Workers’ Party members, fearing their subversive actions, and the ports and train stations were being closely surveilled. The Morrisons arrive, blithe English tourists, into a tense and paranoid Prussia; though perhaps not quite fully comprehended by Charlotte, this sense of simmering unrest under the surface of things seeps into her consciousness.

Another echo buried in the text is Siegfried’s Rhine Journey in Richard Wagner’s...