And you, what will you do for your country at war?

Ireland is a factory of writers who are not afraid to mix “literature and politics”: perhaps because they are braver, perhaps because they have experienced more hardship, perhaps because they have such a powerful literary tradition (with an imposed language, but that would be another debate) they have the tools and the will for anything. And such a entrenched and painful conflict as has occurred in this country yields results like the work of Audrey Magee, whose poignant The Colony (Periscopi, 2024) we already knew, and from whom we now receive The Commitment, an earlier novel, but no less interesting or current for that: the typical historical novel that makes you think, a lot, about what we would do today if a war broke out. The answers it gives are quite distressing: surely we are all more selfish and submissive than we imagine.

Like any of us, Peter Faber and Katharina Spinell, the absolute protagonists of the novel, see their “small story” intersected by the brutality of a “great story”: nothing more and nothing less than the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War. Like us, they have families – fathers, mothers, siblings – and neighbors, who behave in very different ways. There are those who immediately approach those who are clearly in charge and do everything they are asked, like little sheep waiting for a reward, but there are also those who maintain ideological convictions or political ideals no matter what happens. The novel shows in an exemplary way the rewards or punishments that each person receives, without apriorisms or clichés, but by getting down to the arena of telling concrete stories, full of twists, cruel and hurtful like life itself, which understands no sweeteners.

Getting married without knowing each other at all

In the beginning, Peter and Katharina make a peculiar decision: they will marry without knowing each other at all, one to have a few weeks' leave and escape the horrible Russian front, and the other to aspire to a widow's pension if, as is most likely, her husband falls as cannon fodder for the German army. The thing is, they like each other more than expected, and within days, they form a deep bond. Then, however, events unfold inexorably: while in Berlin, Katharina's family seems to have made the right choice by approaching the new Nazi party and treating Jews as scum, the front that seemed to be sweeping through Ukraine begins to suffer, and severely, at the hands of the Red Army and the Russian snow. The war pages are of exemplary rawness and humanity. Those that show the pettiness of wealthy families are not left behind.

There is a premise of dramatic writing that says that if a room with ten people catches fire, within five minutes we will have an exact description of the ten personalities trapped there, observing only their reaction: flee, help others, remain paralyzed. It seems that Magee follows it to the letter, because she writes novels that are very dramatic: they are dialogued from top to bottom, and there are chapters of only ten lines, or half a page, which are brief scenes that illustrate much more than they explain. She makes the characters talk and talk, instead of using the tools of omniscient narrators. Thus, we witness a series of scenes that, with a single sentence or a small comment, reveal a whole: when Katharina arrives, desperate, with her sick child, at the rich and Nazi family that had been protecting her for months, she is met with a couple of brief replies that make her understand that the distance (of class, above all) that separates them will never disappear.

Greed, emptiness, fascination with a bombastic Führer who speaks of Fatherlands and Destinies in capital letters, selfishness and lack of empathy towards neighbors and fellow human beings when things get tough, subservience to power, racial hatred, the useless heroism of the soldier, and the infinite dignity of the woman who endures everything while waiting: there is room for everything in a novel that, moreover, is an action novel. What more could we want for a classic summer read?