Outsiders find voice in populous panorama

THE multifaceted continent-skipping century-traversing constitution of Philip Hensher’s latest novel, The Emperor Waltz, renders it highly ambitious.

Philip Hensher has produced an ambitious, grand and segmented work.

DESPITE weighing in at more than 700 pages, Philip Hensher’s longest novel to date, The Northern Clemency (2008), can be boiled down to a concise synopsis: the lives of two families in the north of England across the past three decades of the 20th century against the backdrop of social and political upheaval.

Hensher’s latest novel, The Emperor Waltz, is 100 pages shy of that previous doorstop but its multifaceted continent-skipping century-traversing constitution renders it considerably more ambitious. Rather than a backdrop, Hensher has created a sprawling panorama. Instead of a contained clutch of characters there is a fecund cast.

As such, the novel stubbornly resists a simple narrative breakdown. Embarking on it — and indeed summarising it — involves unpicking its many intricate strands and viewing them in isolation. However, as we immerse ourselves in it, Hensher’s themes and subplots begin to coalesce, until we are able to stand back and marvel at the glorious whole.

The book zigzags through the years but returns us on more than one occasion to two separate sections. The first deals with the birth and growth of the avant-garde Bauhaus art movement in 1920s Germany. We follow art student Christian Vogt from his constrained family life in Berlin to his self-discovery and self-expression in Weimar. He falls for seamstress Adele, learns his craft, and by 1927 has progressed from suitor and student to husband and teacher.

The other main section focuses on Duncan and his determination to found and keep alive a gay bookshop in 1980s London.

The German segments are rich in historical detail and insight but curiously underwhelming. Hensher is far more sure-footed with his chronicle of London’s burgeoning gay scene and the slow journey towards tolerance. In this era, Duncan’s is the only gay bookshop in the city, gay bars and clubs don’t exist, and a Campaign for Homosexual Equality group is forced to meet furtively above a pub. Hensher constructs a tight-knit circle of friends and rotates points of view to showcase each character’s public plight and private concerns.

Spliced with these chunkier sections are shorter ones from markedly different times. In ‘‘Last month’’ we are given an author’s first-person account of his stay in hospital, his musing on friendship and society almost drowned out by the rants of an incontinent alcoholic Irish tramp in the same ward. And in ‘‘AD 203’’ we are taken to a small outpost in the African desert to witness the imprisonment and death of a 14-year-old girl and her slave for their Christian beliefs.

It is only in the last pages of these sections that Hensher reveals his characters’ identities: the girl mauled by animals in an amphitheatre is Perpetua the Christian martyr; and the writer in hospital with an infected foot is called ‘‘Phil’’ by his husband Zaved — which also happens to be the name of Hensher’s husband.

The Emperor Waltz benefits from this kind of authorial reticence. Hensher is adept at re-creating significant historical epochs but does so with inference, preferring us to join his dots rather than be spoonfed facts. When two coffees cost two artists 200,000 marks each we know that hyperinflation has taken hold in the Weimar Republic. This subtlety becomes dramatic irony when Christian sees men in uniform and notices that ‘‘on their arms was a band, and on the band was some sort of motif’’.

Anti-Semitism and homophobia are manifested in snide comments. AIDS kills many of Duncan’s friends but is never mentioned by name, referred to only as ‘‘the gay plague’’ by haters and called a ‘‘rare Chinese bone disease’’ by one victim in denial both of the disease that has ravaged him and his true sexuality.

At the heart of the novel, and uniting each section, is the struggle faced by outsider groups and individuals to fit in and be accepted. The Bauhaus, ahead of its time, is dismissed by one traditionalist as being full of ‘‘communists and garlic-eaters and free-love practitioners’’. Duncan and his coterie are ‘‘daft Herberts’’. The Christians are a cult that drinks blood and sacrifices children.

But still Hensher’s marginalised and beleaguered characters persevere to be heard and understood. ‘‘You could only change the world by changing the way individuals thought, one individual at a time, as if turning towards the sun.’’ These words reappear in various combinations like a melodic refrain. More musical, and binding the book further, is Strauss’s Emperor Waltz, the bars of which winnow through sections and affect characters in unique ways.

However, as with all big and segmented books, some weaker links let the side down. One section entitled ‘‘Next Year’’ briefly impresses with its virtuosic A Clockwork Orange-esque youth-speak (people or things are ‘‘skeen’’, ‘‘wagwarn’’, ‘‘nang’’, ‘‘jezzy’’, ‘‘piff’’, ‘‘sket’’) but it soon fizzles out. Elsewhere, great slabs of backstory add little to the plot and assume the form of padding. Do we need to hear about Adele’s Bavarian puppet-maker father or Duncan’s pre-bookshop teaching stint in Sicily? And as Hensher keeps minting new characters right up to the final pages, there are episodes that stop pulsing with life and instead feel simply overpopulated.

Ultimately, though, the faults are routinely offset by flipside strengths — vibrant key players eclipsing redundant secondary characters; powerful and emotionally charged drama smothering those sporadic longueurs.

The Emperor Waltz triumphs, thanks to Hensher’s dizzying scope, polyphonic voices and array of brilliant set pieces. On this occasion, size matters.

Malcolm Forbes is a Berlin-based reviewer.

The Emperor Waltz

By Philip Hensher

Fourth Estate, 614pp, $39.99