Book of the Month: Two Brothers (Ben Elton)

Call me snobbish but until recently I had not read any of Ben Elton’s novels, because Elton wasn’t literary enough for me. I changed my mind after I heard him in a live interview when he was promoting his fourteenth novel, Two Brothers. This was partly because the interviewer, a pompous sounding man, no doubt a lecturer in some provincial town, treated Elton throughout the interview with the kind of amusing condescension one reserves for a dullard in the family whose attempt at whatever he is doing is rather pathetic but nevertheless needs encouragement for no other reason than human kindness. Elton, on his part, gave back as much as he got (he even asked the interviewer at one stage how many novels he had written that were published). I liked that. I also liked that Elton gave the impression (with considerable success) of being supremely unconcerned about literary critics not taking him seriously. His novels sold by the millions (apparently) and that would do for him.

I decided to read Two Brothers. Partly because, having decided to read Ben Elton, I felt his fourteenth novel was as good a novel as any of his previous thirteen, but also because Elton said that it was his most personal novel, based on his family’s history. It might not have been a literary novel (Elton couldn’t give tuppence about it) but it was a novel with a serious theme, with Holocaust as its background.

Two Brothers, as the title implies is the story of two brothers. Two Jewish brothers, except that one of them is not Jewish, as he is adopted. The novel is however not just about the two brothers, Paulus and Otto; it is also about their parents Wolfgang and Frieda Stengel; Dagmar Fischer the rich Jewish girl both the brothers are in love with, and Silke Krause, their Aryan friend and a budding Communist,  the daughter of the Stengels’ friend who is secretly in love with Otto. The story unfolds against the backdrop to the novel is the Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, from the days of the Weimer republic to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. The novel traces the early happy years in the lives of the Stengel family—Wolfgang is a jazz musician while Frieda is training to be a doctor. The family survives the post First World War chaos in the 1920s before the family’s fortunes brighten a bit, only to sink again in the Great Depression and the rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The time of the novel is set in two time periods: the 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany and the Britain in the 1950s where one of the brothers has been living following the Second World War. I shall not reveal which of the two brothers was adopted and which survived the war and the Holocaust, although I do not think Elton means it to be the secret; the identities are revealed long before the novel reaches its end. The surviving brother has been working in the British Foreign Office and, a decade after the war ended, has received a letter from East Germany from Dagmar, who—the reader is informed in the initial chapters—married the other brother before the outbreak of the war, expressing a wish to meet him. The brother who has anglicized his name to Michael is eager to meet Dagmar except that he is quite sure that the writer of the letter is not Dagmar—who, he is convinced, perished in the Holocaust— but a Stasi agent who has a very good knowledge of the Stengel family history. This is a trap to lure him. MI5 are of the same view and meet with Michael prior to his proposed travel to East Berlin. Michael has a shrewd guess as to who has written the letter, but he still is determined to travel to the city of his birth and meet the writer of the letter. This is not the only twist in the novel. Elton packs in more twists in the novel than on a winding country road in the South of France.

At almost 600 pages Two Brothers is a huge sprawling novel. Elton does know how to spin a yarn. The prose style is pacy, and at times gripping. A quick and easy read, which, despite the unpleasantness of the subject matter, amusing at times (without being irreverent). Elton paints his characters with a broad brush; he is not one for subtlety. Paulus is the calm and calculating one; he has a plan for everything, the sort of boy whom you can easily visualise sitting in Dragon’s Den asking searching questions to the would be entrepreneurs, calculating potential profits. Otto is the headstrong one, whose response to any conflict is an invitation to the other party to step aside and have a fight. Frieda, their mother, is nobleness personified. Most of the characters drawn are of only two shades. The character of Dagmar, who comes to play a pivotal role in the lives of the two brothers, on the other hand, has no depth. The heavy style of exposition becomes a tad clunky at times. The atmosphere of terror (for the Jews) unleashed by Hitler and the Nazis is described in a manner that has the force of tornado, with language that is at times florid. Perhaps Elton was of the view that the the nature of the atrocity perpetrated by the Nazis could only be conveyed adequately by prose that pulled no punches. The result, at times, is reiterating the obvious. Thus, in a chapter on the Night of Broken Glasses, after describing at some considerable length, using stark images, the violence unleashed against the Jews, Elton informs the readers that it was apocalyptic. Elton has done historical research for the novel, and is driven by the need to demonstrate it. The novel, at times, reads like a history lesson, as the invisible, omnipotent narrator feels the need to stop the flow of the fictional narrative and educate and remind the reader that Hitler was an evil man. It gets a tad jarring after a while. The dialogues are a curious mixture of clichés (“Only Jews could produce an Einstein”) and slang which is more British than German. The characters refer to each other as “mates” and use words like “wankers” to express contempt. Even allowing for the fact that this is an English version of what the fictional characters say in German, seeing as the period of the novel is Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems a bit ersatz.

Two Brothers is a novel that is, for all its weaknesses, remarkable for the author’s sincerity. In the Afterword, Elton tells the reader the inspiration behind the novel. The reader learns that Elton is Jewish from his father’s side, and the family’s original, German Jewish name was Ehrenberg. Elton’s uncle, Gottfried Ehrenberg, after enlisting in the British army in 1943, changed the name to Geoffrey Elton; and Elton’s father, Ludwig, followed suit, and anglicized the name to Lewis Elton. Elton then goes on to inform that a cousin of his father and uncle, Heinz Ehrenberg, was an Aryan child who was adopted by his Jewish parents and went on to serve in the Wehrmacht. It turns out that some of fantastic sounding “set-pieces” in the novel have been taken from real life stories from Elton’s family. Thus, the end of the noble Frieda—she volunteers to accompany Jewish children being sent east when she is not required to go, and is gassed on arrival—theatrical as it may sound, is how Elton’s great aunt (grandmother’s sister) died.

Perhaps Elton could have written a family memoir instead of novel with unnecessary and unconvincing twists.