Book review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

 Wow.

As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.

One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.

The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.

Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")

Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.

I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".

A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

The closed door

I’m currently in a state where I think about suicide most days. There are many days wherein I actively consider it (and I know many of the people reading this will recognise the difference); days where I hold the concept of ending my life in my hand to view it, more or less dispassionately, considering how viable an option it is.


I am not afraid of death. While many things will happen after I die, I am pretty certain that none of them will involve me. There are, of course, downsides to this course of action; it negates the possibility of improvement. The worry of the transition - the pain of the razor biting into my wrists, the panic and evacuation as the cord tightens around my neck, perhaps the few seconds of acceleration from the high roof will be stretched to an eternity by adrenaline - but these would be fleeting. The main concern is the effect on those who care for me. My friends, my sister. My son. A man now, almost 24, what effect would it have on him? A child should bury their parents, that is the natural order of things, but it hurts so much - and how much more so should that loss be at their own hand? (My mother was taken by lung cancer and, while that was caused by her habituation to cigarettes, I never blamed her for it). My father; no parent should have to bury their child, though I know millions do.


In a way this is encouraging, the fact that these things are of concern to me; there have been times in the past when they have attenuated to the thinnest thread of connection, when that particular mix of pain and numbness has meant that I have considered that any pain of losing me would be outweighed by the pain my continued existence would cause. Times when I have held that concept of ending in my hand and nodded, have stood on the brink of accepting it, seeing it as a gift (fortunately I live in a country that disallows access to firearms, or the simplicity of placing that steel barrel in my mouth or under my chin, angling it upward toward the seat of my consciousness and having to only argue against or distract my survival instinct for that brief moment to allow me to squeeze the trigger; had I not, I doubt very much I would be here, now, writing these words).


So I will continue. The spectre will be kept at bay by distraction, by company and the solitude of reading, by the endorphin rush of running, by the distraction of TV, by the regularity of the day-to-day, of work and shopping and cleaning. And, hopefully, I will rise from this dip to a point where I can forget awhile that door that I know how to open, that I can step through and end all worry and speculation. Although I think that, once you are aware of that door, and have acknowledged that it is unlocked, its possibility, its promise, can never be forgotten.