Embers
Sandor Marai Viking, 224pp, £12.99
ISBN 0670910996
Embers was first published in Budapest in 1942, but did not receive the recognition it deserved until a year after Sandor Marai's death in 1989, when it was rediscovered by the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso. The novel has subsequently become a worldwide bestseller and is published in the UK for the first time in an admirable translation by Carol Brown Janeway.
It begins with lashings of Gothic atmosphere. A cantankerous old Hungarian general, languishing in his castle in the Carpathian mountains, tended by his 90-year-old childhood nurse, receives word that a long-lost friend intends to pay him a visit. The nurse and servants make the castle ready, bringing suitable vintages up from the cellar and preparing food. Meanwhile, Henrik, the general, muses about the 41 years that have passed since he last saw his friend, Konrad. It soon becomes clear that a terrible betrayal happened many years ago in July 1899, on the "day of the hunt". The friend arrives, they have a fine dinner, and then Henrik launches into a speech that lasts nearly half the novel. In this, he discusses the nature of his friendship with Konrad, both men's relationship to Henrik's wife and his recollection of the pivotal moment when everything changed.
Embers is so rooted in its period as to be quite difficult to appreciate without a thorough understanding of Hungarian history before and during the Second World War. The story of the treachery and unreliability of so-called friends offers an allegory about Hungary's relationship with its European neighbours during the first half of the 20th century. Henrik - with his mystical views on the nature of his property, his relationship with his servants, and the duty owed to him - represents the last vestige of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, which, although nearly destroyed by the First World War, still maintained a grip on power in Hungary during the Twenties and Thirties. This aristocratic elite believed the Nazis were Hungary's true friends. Hitler lured Hungary into becoming an Axis power with the promise to restore the two-thirds of its land lost after the First World War. When it became clear, in 1941, that it was all a sham, the prime minister, Count Pal Teleki, a figure very similar to Henrik in Embers, shot himself. Ostensibly this was because Hungary had signed a pact of "eternal friendship" with Yugoslavia just a few months before the Nazis, assisted by the Hungarian army, overran the Balkans. However, Teleki's reasons for suicide were disingenuous; he wanted to present himself as the honourable Magyar who would rather die than go back on his word, but in reality he must have known that the pact of friendship was a lie when it was signed. It is much more likely that he foresaw that, in forging an alliance with the Nazis, Hungary's elite had signed their own death warrant.
The duplicities and ironies of friendship lie at the heart of Marai's narrative. And ultimately, it seems, the general betrayed himself, his friend and his wife as much as they betrayed him. As well as being comparable to works by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, Embers bears striking similarities to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: an intense friendship between men from different classes is ruined by the intervention of a woman; both are set in magnificently redundant buildings steeped in family history and nostalgia. Where Brideshead offers a loose allegory of the failure of the British upper classes to maintain a grip on power, or assume responsibility for its subjects, so in Embers we encounter a world of exiles, bitterness and recrimination, beauty and pathos, lost hopes and love. But this is just one facet of a remarkable novel of myriad meaning and interpretations.
Francis Gilbert is completing a novel on wartime Hungary
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