The Visible World - Mark Slouka

A novel documenting one man's quest to find out the truth about the mysterious man his mother truly loved, The Visible World is a sweeping, poetic tale encompassing war and the unyeilding strength of wartime love.

Split into three parts, the novel begins with the unnamed narrator remembering growing up in New York after leaving his parents' native Czechoslovakia. After his mother's suicide, it then documents his journey to Prague to find out the truth about his mother's lover before she married his father. When he doesn't find the answers he seeks, in the third part the narrator then imagines the story of the love affair, envisioning his mother's lover as Tomas, one of the men involved with the assassination of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

Using long, winding prose, The Visible World unfurls slowly, scattering the horrendous tales of World War Two Czechoslovakia among stunning observations about love and relationships. In its first section, the narrator remembers his parents entertaining fellow Czechs in New York. They swap folk tales and play traditional music to keep memories of their homeland alive. His parents' relationship is seemingly based on compromise and the narrator is infuriated by his father's quiet acceptance of his mother's love for this mysterious, absent man.

In its first part, the novel builds up appearances of contentment, which are quickly punctured by events bubbling under the surface. The facade of happiness is shattered with mini parables dotted throughout the narrative, such as his parents' aquaintance Mr Chalupa, a suspected Nazi conspiritor, who dies quickly of cancer and his mother's flowers in the garden, which, after an excited buying frenzy, wither and die after she stops tending to them, replaced with weeds.

When the narrator travels to Prague in the novel's second section, he hopes to find the truth about his mother's love. Instead, he finds war veterans whose scraps of memories intersect with his mother's life. There is no definite, concrete answer to this man, how they met, why they parted and what happened to him, much to the narrator's frustration. It leads to the book's third section, his fictional account of what may have been.

It is here that Slouka's writing truly comes into being. With his never-ending sentences and catch-a-breath images he creates and imagines a blistering wartime love affair doomed from the start. In this popular genre of fiction, it would be easy to verge on cliches and tired characters. But Slouka gives it an entire new dimension, writing a relationship which is so true to life it's easy to forget it is fiction.

Tomas and Ivana quickly fall for each other and it is a world-stops-turning romance. Ivana turns her back on her boyfriend and her family for just a few days with Tomas. They creep away from the real world, inhabiting their own space in a forest, foraging for food and living in dream-like bliss. After those few days, what time they have left together happens in snatches and shadows - a chance encounter at a tram, a day walking the streets and hiding together in a cemetary. It is convincing and engrossing, showing just how far reaching war and its consequences are. Slouka writes like an angel, describing Tomas's fears, weaknesses and terrors as perfectly as he conjures up his love for Ivana.

A novel which brings to life the sheer madness of war as expertly as it captures the obssessive way love can make nothing else matter, The Visible World is a magnificent read which shows how love can stifle and ruin lives once it is snatched away.

My next read: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller.