‘The real aim of this review,’ he said, candidly, ‘is to explore the response to the review of the original article’. ‘Or the original review?’ said I. ‘Or the original review,’ he repeated, nodding sagely, scratching the top of his right thigh with the first two fingers of his left hand. So far as I could tell he was being serious. But I couldn’t be too sure. ‘The book itself, as you know, is far from simple’. This time it was my turn to nod, revealing as I did my own awareness of the situation, without having to commit myself to any particular way of thinking. What did he mean by simple? Hadn’t Husch’s ruse been to make things look more complicated than they really were? In which case the book was simple, just in a complicated way. But now wasn’t the time to go into that. Nor should we venture into a discussion of why it was this man was so keen on itching his own thigh. No, there is plenty enough for us to be getting on with as it is.
‘The thing about this review; this review of the review of the review, is that it fails to come to any conclusions as to what the author the book, that is to say Hermann Husch, is or was meaning to achieve. Taking issue with the review of the review, which supports the notion that Husch has always been mentally unstable – in contrast to the original review, which argued that he was at the top of his form and in full control of his mind – it prefers to tread the line between each and every attitude, finding all of them simultaneously valid and yet wanting’. The man paused, during which time he transferred his attention to an itch on his forehead. I manufactured a satisfied smile, confirming that I agreed with everything he had said up to this point. ‘Shall we go on?’ he asked. I took the baton.
‘I think the important thing about this review is that it doesn’t get too overexcited by Husch’s tactics. It recognises that he may be trying to infuriate his readers, and attempts to downplay this at every turn. We could say that it refuses to take part in his game; that it is, in a way, a sort of neutral supporter’. The man nodded. ‘But of course,’ he said, ‘we’re only really scratching the surface here, aren’t we?’ ‘Like old plates on freshly varnished tables,’ I murmured, wishing that each word could have re-entered my mouth as soon as they had left it. In his eccentric kindness, the man pretended that he had not heard me. And went on: ‘Perhaps we ought to take a moment or two to look at the book itself’. ‘Sure,’ I said.
There is an oboe. And it is made of bone. Whose bone it is (or was) is open to debate. Some claim that it is dinosaur bone, others a human bone, still others the bone of a wombat-like creature, with five legs instead of four. This is one of many contentious points. Here are some of the others: How old is the bone oboe? Who does the bone oboe rightfully belong to? Is there more than one bone oboe? Is it made out of bone? Is there a bone oboe at all? Is the bone oboe the fictional creation of Alexander Kreben, a Russian spy and music shop owner living in Berlin during the First World War? Or is it Kreben who is fictional, the creation of Hermann Husch, the Polish novelist? Or is the Hermann Husch who appears in the novel not really the novelist himself, but a fictional version of him? And what was that about a bone oboe?
First things first. Husch – as in the actual physical being – has a history. This he – as in the quasi-non-physical being – tells us this in the book. That is to say that he admits to writing fiction in the guise of non-fiction – something that we know Hermann Husch, the actual person, has done. If this sounds confusing, it isn’t really. It amounts to very little in the end. Quite simply, Husch has spent a considerable amount of time as a self-employed spoof merchant. Not unlike fishmongers (excepting the small fact that they have absolutely nothing to do with fish or any other sea creature) these people rely on slippery substances for a living. Thus has Husch fabricated documents, magicked evidence, penned countless articles on people and places that don’t exist, on the understanding that they do. Indeed, he has spent so much time assuming fake identities, he tells us, that he has come close on several occasions to forgetting who he is. Like many actors, he has spent so much time playing a part, that his own life has been pushed to the margins, lost in the sidelines, nudged into the knotted hedgerows. Or so he says. But dare we trust him when he makes these admissions; when he falls to his bony knees and begs like a doe-eyed dog for our blessed sympathy?
More about this oboe of ours, or his, or anyone’s. No one ever plays it. That isn’t really the point of it. It doesn’t even work, so far the reader knows. It may not even exist in its original form. The important thing is that it is worth a lot to many people. And these people are more than willing to fight for it, in whatever way they can. Physical violence, psychological violence, eerily passive violence. Needless to say, the bone oboe is important. But it’s also one of those symbols. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And this meaning doesn’t necessarily mean anything. For it is the actions of the people involved, as they make or follow their own false meaning, that create the real semi-universal meaning. Any fool may tell you this. So long as that fool is not Hermann Husch. After all, this man still maintains that the bone oboe has a basis in reality…
The man is picking his nose or, as we say in the East, ‘mining for greenstone’. I choose to ignore him, though I will most probably keep an eye out for where his hand goes next, lest the cover of Husch’s book should be speckled with snot forthwith. ‘So,’ he says, completing the excavation with a victorious nostril wipe, ‘as for this spoof business…’. I take this as an invitation to speak. ‘Well,’ I start, ‘it is probably a phase that most writers go through. And a perfectly natural phase at that. It’s no more than regular fiction, in all but one detail. It refuses to admit it. In this way, we might conclude that it is a childish phase. Something writers do when they’re young’. ‘Example?’ ‘How about Jean-Pierre Sertin’s, Go See This Play, Five Stars, *****! (Oh, and Carrots Too)’ ‘How about it?’ ‘Well, it may not be spoof as such, but it is an attempt to deal with that whole play-within-a-play thing, trying to extend the boundaries so far that the audience do not know what it is real and what isn’t.’ ‘But surely none of it is real?’ ‘Perhaps that it is the point. Or else there is no point. It’s just a bunch of words. We’d be wasting our time trying to get to the bottom of it.’ ‘Would we?’
As a student he filmed a documentary for a Polish television channel. It was about a small village in Germany, the residents of which had long been involved in a deep personal war. The cause of the often violent disagreement was a musical instrument. A bone oboe. According to Husch, this documentary never aired, on account of censorship issues. Husch’s grievances, meanwhile, aired in a book, via the mouth of his alter ego, the other Hermann Husch. Most doubt, however, that the documentary ever existed. A few have been known to fight to prove this fact. Most of us have reached a point in which we don’t really care. We accept that Husch is not necessarily a man to be believed. He is a writer of fiction; a purveyor of tales and yarns. We shouldn’t believe a word he says, should we?
I don’t know why he mentioned Jean-Pierre Sertin. He is, after all, a generally honest writer, in so far as this is possible. He plays games with his audience, or with his readers, but this is, as someone might have said, ‘only natural’. It is expected of him. We’d be disappointed, would we not, to go and see a magician, and discover that he was unwilling to trick us? ‘We yearn to be deceived’ as Husch writes on page 143 of The Bone Oboe. This is, incidentally, that point in the text in which the author begins to preach against parody. And what an opportune moment. Already encased within a book, within a book, within a book, he suddenly comes to the conclusion that the tradition is cruel. ‘Sickeningly knowing,’ is how he describes it at one point. Elsewhere he talks of writers ‘covering up their deficiencies by pretending to be much cleverer than they really are’. This kind of ‘foul play’ is far too common, he argues, stretching its overeager tendrils into the region of film as well. Here, ‘visual tricks and flashbacks’ are used to ‘cloud an issue which is not really an issue at all.’ ‘Misting up a window that was never there’ is how he chooses to sum this up. Before moving into a flashback of his own.
‘Is Husch the ultimate trickster?’ asks the first reviewer. ‘Has he picked up the boundary rope and gone for a mighty run?’ ‘Is The Bone Oboe the greatest puzzle of twenty-first century literature?’. ‘It’s possible,’ she concludes, tapping the last key with barely contained satisfaction. A month or so later, the second reviewer begins his reply. ‘Hermann Husch is ill,’ he writes, grinning all the while. ‘The Bone Oboe is a document fit for psychology students only. Husch has lost all conception of reality and is crying, screaming, yelping for our help. Put the book down and give his doctor a ring.’ He is proud of this first paragraph, though he will change it later on. Following this it will be edited, not once, but twice. By the time it is printed, only the word ‘yelping’ will remain. But the second reviewer will already be in the pub by then, toying with an empty glass.
‘If only it would let you rest. The book, I mean. For there are some good passages’. She consults the map again, discovering that we ought to have, really ought to have turned right a long time ago. The other person in the car, whoever that is, is falling asleep. Which makes this a soliloquy, I guess. ‘All that stuff set in the war,’ she continues, ‘I like those bits. It’s almost as if you’re reading a proper novel. The Kreben stuff amounts to half of a good crime story. And there’s some nice historical fiction in there as well, if you look closely enough.’ The other person in the car, whoever that is, is definitely asleep by now. The indicator keeps time to a song on the radio. ‘He reminds me of the child who refuses to go to bed. Who simply wants to play and play and play all day long.’
The third review was the one we were looking at. The one that managed to suggest that Husch was both insane and sane at the same time. The one that refused to commit to any one point of view. The one that described in detail how Husch had built his career on lies; how spoof was a ‘mostly adolescent pastime’, but which finished nonetheless with a pretty convincing appraisal of his novel: ‘mad, infuriating, but not unattractive’. At least, I think this was what it said.
He reads from a newspaper. The date is obscured. ‘You may be interested to hear that yesterday German archaeologists uncovered a strange object in an old graveyard outside of Munich. Subject to further tests and research, they have no idea what it is, was or could be. Early this morning they found something else. One or two of them knew exactly what this was. It was a bone oboe’. The man scratched his earlobe with his forefinger. Had he got lice, I wondered?
Review by T E Heeman
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