TurboBookSnob
Review
(continued) |
In
a confession that changes Peter's life irrevocably, his mother reveals
that Peter's kindly, stalwart father is not his real sire, but an
affable man who raised Peter as his own. Peter's mother, as
it turns out, traveled to Leipzig in East Germany sixteen years
before to compete in a choral competition, indulging in a brief
but profound affair with an unnamed East German prisoner.
In search of a family
history he never realized he lacked, Peter travels to Cold War East
Germany in search of his past and his identity. In Leipzig
he has little success in locating any information about his father,
but in a series of events that echo his mother's part, he encounters
an enigmatic young East German woman, known to him only as Snowleg.
Peter is immediately transfixed, indulging in wild possibilities,
such as smuggling Snowleg across the border when he returns to university
in West Germany.
Peter is oblivious to
the political tensions in the Cold War town, and heedlessly invites
Snowleg to a banquet attended by notaries, businessmen, and visitors.
In a scene that eerily echoes Simon Peter's denial of Jesus Christ,
Peter publicly denies his acquaintance with Snowleg, unaware of
the fate to which he has casually doomed her or of the resulting
obsession that will haunt him for the rest of his life. For
Peter, like Simon Peter before him, becomes immediately plagued
with guilt and regret, the desire to atone and redeem. He
will live the rest of his life with the ever-present knowledge that
at the pivotal cusp, when life and death and honor are decided by
men's courage, he abjectly fails to live up to his idealized vision
of himself as Sir Bedevere.
In Snowleg, Nicholas Shakespeare
has written a spellbinding tale of love and betrayal, truth and
deception, redemption and release. Shakespeare's writing cloaks
the novel in icy mystery. He evokes a fragile, frozen world
made brittle by political conflict in constant struggle with the
human spirit. This is the first novel by Nicholas Shakespeare
that the TurboBookSnob has read, and it has certainly whetted her
appetite for more from this fine writer. |