Allan Massie - Böcker

A discussion of the British novel from 1970 to 1989 which considers the various types of novel produced and looks at some of the main writers in the various categories.

Klaus, the core work in this collection, is a a novella that recounts the last days of Klaus Mann's life, while referring back to the trials of the Mann family (Klaus being Thomas Mann's son) and Klaus's own autobiographical novel, Mephisto, one of his better known works partly because it was banned in West Germany for decades for its portrayal of his ex-lover Gustaf Grundgens, before being turned into an Academy Award-winning film. Massie's novella attempts to unlock Klaus's relationship with his father, his former lover and his art. Klaus is an appropriate follow-on from Surviving (Vagabond Voices, 2009) in that writing is a major theme. With his usual thoroughness disguised by concision and a masterly light touch, Massie sets about examining how human relatinoships and artistic endeavour interact, and this book also goes back to those "public" themes that dominate so much of his other works of fiction set in the twentieth century. The novella alone would make this collection worthy of note, but the short stories will also fascinate the many who know Massie's work and admire it. They come from his long writing career and have been published under one cover for the first time.Klaus and two other stories has just been written, while there are others from the nineties, the eighties and even the seventies.

This is a survey of contemporary British fiction. Focussing primarily on the distinctive achievement and personality of each writer, the author also discusses the contribution of British fiction to such genres as women's writing, the political novel, spy and crime fiction. It addresses questions such as the rise of mass market publishing and the emergence of an international readership in assessing the role of the modern author as we approach the twenty-first century.

Widely acclaimed as Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties engages with all the complexities and ambiguities of loyalty, nationality and family as they are put under threat by betrayal, by errors of judgement, or simply friendship.Etienne de Balafré, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father. Was Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book brilliantly explores the ties between fathers and sons and the pains of love and duty in a period of European history that is still characterised by wilful denial and hatred.

A Nazi war criminal's son and a Holocaust survivor's daughter decide to get married in the pleasant, middle-class conformity of sixties Argentina. When the two families come together, Becky's blind father recognises the voice of the former SS officer, and sets off a chain of events that to varying degrees damage everyone at that meeting. Franz has to discover the real past of his rather distant father, who is kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken to Israel for trial. The action shifts to that country, and then to England. Allan Massie uses this drama to explore a wealth of ideas concerning such themes as guilt, retribution, identity, power, political motivation, memory and above all, as the title implies, the effects of brutal conflicts and war crimes on the following generation. Massie does not dwell on the savagery of the crimes, but forensically analyses the scar they leave in history, suggesting that, post Holocaust, we inhabit a different moral world - a world in which we can no longer ignore the enormity of the crimes of which we are capable.

Set in nineties Rome, Surviving tells the story of a group of English-speaking ex-patriot alcoholics whose fragile existences are kept together by a network of friendships. This book has been widely reviewed and always appreciated for its depth, simplicity, economy of language and understanding.