SEVEN LIES
by James Lasdun
Cape, £14.99; 208pp
JAMES LASDUN IS rapidly becoming a master at ensnaring the reader in such a way that the outside world might as well not exist.
His previous novel, the highly effective psychological horror story The Horned Man, was slashed through with bloody murders. But more impressively Seven Lies refines its mystery and revelation down to, if not a single moment, then a single flaw in the character of its narrator, the supposed poet Stefan Vogel.
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Born and raised in the former East Germany, Stefan tells his story from New York, where he and his partner, Inge, fled in 1986. The tangled path that led them there, beginning in the falsehoods of Stefan’s childhood, is the subject of his confession.
It all began, Freudians will be satisfied to note, with his mother and her folie de grandeur. After her bureaucrat husband’s career peters out, she seeks to enhance her social standing through the arts. At her monthly salons the lie regarding Stefan’s poetic inclinations first took shape, bolstered by his plagiarism of an obscure Western compendium.
From that point, Stefan’s life is governed by lies and evasions, and his experience is, in microcosm, the story of life in the GDR, where hypocrisy and betrayal were a matter of course. Moving through his university career (an undeserved place at Humboldt secured via his uncle, a Party official) and his job as a writer of propaganda posters, Stefan’s account unfolds as a possibly dubious document: should the reader not consider the possibility that the confession of a liar is itself a lie?
Certainly his inability genuinely to shoulder any blame for what he reveals he has done (which I won’t touch upon here) suggests that there is a perversity at his core. Again, this seems to be an artful evocation of the effect of totalitarianism on the individual. But if this sounds drably psychological, I am doing the novel a disservice: it is short, intense, powerful and superbly crafted.
Precisely halfway through, Stefan experiences a brief romantic interlude that reveals itself as the one pure event in his life; a moment of grace that adds pungent sorrow to the book. That is Lasdun’s achievement: to hold up a painfully flawed individual and capture his, and our, humanity.