Gerard Donovan’s Schopenhauer’s
Telescope is an exceptionally bleak and vaguely otherworldly novel set in
an unnamed European country at the time of a great and horrific war. Spread
along the course of a single day, it tells the sorry and unsettling tale of a
baker who is possibly a native collaborator with the brutal colonising forces.
These rather faceless forces, it soon emerges, have inflicted great civilian
casualties in a quite cruel manner. The novel effectively records the detailed
minutes of a sombre day-long dialogue between the suspected collaborator, who
turns out to be a very odd character indeed, and a teacher who until recently
taught the young children of the town. (The teachers’ wife may or may not have
been a victim of the suspected collaborator, adding tension to the latter
stages of the conversation.)

   
European towns, bakers, death and horror: if the ‘folk-tale’ aspect of
this narrative reminds one of the novels of Franz Kafka, it is worth pointing
out here that positing such an association would, in the end, be misplaced.
Ultimately, this is a something of a philosophical dialogue, and not only
because several European philosophers — Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger,
for example — are namechecked during the course of the wide-ranging
conversation recorded in the book.  It
is a philosophical dialogue above all because during the long conversations
between the peculiar baker and the traumatised teacher the characters sometimes
appear to become mere mouthpieces for one or another philosophical — or
theological — view, giving the novel itself something like the feel of a drama
rather than a narrative proper, although, apart from the central dialogue, a series
of flashbacks and reveries do color in the back story of these men’s’ rural
lives and their personal characters. But we always return to the sad depiction
of the sparse and unyielding landscape. The staggered and sometimes jarring
language of the work matches the bleak landscape where the narrative is set.

   
The novel opens on the scene of a frozen field where the baker is being
cajoled into digging a mysterious hole, presumably a grave, and it never veers
far from this territory, except at the very end. The pervasive theme of the
novel seems to me to be the silence of an indifferent and sometimes positively
cruel world and silence is often mentioned by Donovan as both a theme and a
failing (see, for instance, pp. 8, 69, 15, 139). Frequently, a surprising
insight by Donovan may be seen to emerge from the dialogue and its silences. In
the end, however, little is offered in the way of salvation by the author to
his characters. In this respect, perhaps, the author is very far removed from
the intentions of the philosopher mentioned in the books’ title, although in
other respects it must be acknowledged that both share a certain obvious
pessimism about the human condition, and perhaps about human nature itself.

   
Ultimately, we may say that this book, characterised as it is by a
largely dialogue based form and by the subject matter of serious crimes
committed by a ruthless invading army, is perhaps to be recommended only to
those seeking something other than escapism and narrative richness in their
appreciation of literature.

© 2003 Matthew Ray

 Matthew Ray, Bristol, UK

Categories: Fiction, Philosophical