In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi occupation.
She tells her story in snapshots, writing in the multiple first-person voices of those who remain at 33 Place Brugmann and those who flee. Charlotte is a young artist who may not see colours, but has ‘vision’. Miss Hobert is a gossip with ‘a rabid imagination’. The courageous and pragmatic Colonel Warlemont resists the occupation with the assistance of his dog Zipper.
The narrative’s diffuse nature can make it hard for the reader to keep up. But Austen’s peripheral approach admirably reinforces the atmosphere of paranoia, confusion and suppressed fear. And such is the glittering, dreamlike quality of the prose that we happily skate over the surface of the text rather than unpick how events are linked.
What really distinguishes the book is that all hindsight is laid aside. The reader lives with the characters through terrifying, and occasionally mildly comic, situations in which no one has any sense of what is happening at the time or how the future may unfold. One beautifully written and memorable short scene follows another. Before the war, Leo Raphaël, an art dealer, enjoys an elegant lunch in a Brussels restaurant with his associate who kindly suggests that it would be best for him to hand over his business – because ‘it is only a matter of time before you will be prevented from working’.
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