All times are precarious. Like the planks and girders of a seaside pier, the path beneath one’s feet is always less permanent than one might prefer to believe, its structure constantly exposed to the winds of change, so that, sooner or later, it is bound to give way.
Sheena Kalayil’s deft new novel, The Others, captures the climate of the German Democratic Republic in 1990 as it began to collapse in on itself, and the lives of three young people caught up in the landslide – Lolita, a trainee doctor from India, Armando, a contract worker from Mozambique, and Theo, an aspirant writer born into the Soviet-aligned shard of the divided Germany. Between them, they mark out the points of a love triangle, shifting in and out of proximity.
Each inhabits those years of young adulthood during which the sweeping internal dramas of one’s own emotions can feel bigger than history, bigger than the world. Nonetheless, each is caught in the web of state surveillance whose imperceptible threads they are required to negotiate; threads which tug on their self-consciousness, unravelling it into a more pervasive sense of mistrust. The stakes, however, are very different for each. Theo’s connections afford him the latitude to decline the role of Stasi informant with relative impunity, while Armando, the father of Clara – a daughter born of a brief liaison with a German investigative reporter – is only too aware of how tenuous his position is, how readily he might be severed from his child.
All three are, in their own way, exceptional, but Kalayil is careful to ground her characters in contradictions that leave them recognisably clay-footed, so much so that the reader feels, deep in the pit of their stomach, a fresh churn of anxiety at every potential mis-step; whether squirrelling a dead man’s bracelet into the folds of a dress or unleashing pent-up frustration against the windshield of a surveilling blue Trabant. If the very nature of their triangular relationship works against the likelihood of a happy ending for all, then the reader finds themself wholly invested in the hope that each will, at least, be able to forestall disaster.
One of the strengths of Kalayil‘s writing is the space she leaves open for shafts of humour to illuminate the gathering storm clouds. The drowned man whose discovery muddies the waters between Lolita and Armando is, for instance, protectively described to Clara as ‘a man who couldn’t swim’. Equally well-judged is the subtlety with which she conveys a world before instantaneity, when misunderstandings accumulated at a more gradual pace, not by WhatsApp or Messenger but by telephone calls or Air Mail.
History, Kalayil suggests, is a set of tacit constraints, heard most clearly only at times of crisis. When the DDR‘s house of identity cards begins to topple, all three corners of the protagonists’ triangle are, to degrees, blindsided by their respective desires. It is the unforeseen, more so than the heartfelt, which limits the final scope of their destinies; a prisoner granted amnesty only to offend again, a latent racism no longer denied expression by an over-intrusive state, a wall whose dismantling offers license along with freedom.
As the winds of a blow-hard squall against our own certainties, Kalayil’s novel serves as a reminder of the human capacity to find new routes to connection, across borders less permanent than nationalism’s insistence, from Mozambique to Germany, from there to here.
The Others by Sheena Kalayil is published by Fly on the Wall Press. To pre-order a copy, click here.
