“Detective Story” is an unlikely title for this book because it is not a standard whodunnit involving a gumshoe in hot pursuit of a murderer. In fact, the identity of the murderers is known right at the start. It’s the why and how that Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész sets out to describe, making this spare offering a compelling and thought-provoking political comment.
This is the story of a political murder by the secret police of an un-named dictatorship — the ambience is strongly South American — as told by one of the perpetrators. Antonio Rojas Martens is a junior member of the regime’s torture and interrogation cell and now scapegoat for an assassination that provoked popular outrage. In prison awaiting certain execution, Martens requests writing material to record his version of the killing of Federigo Salinas, a prominent businessman, and his son Enrique.
In relating his account, Martens, a factotum in the larger scheme of things, has not been smitten by a sudden fit of conscience, nor does he seek to absolve himself. His motive for writing is provoked by a dim understanding, filtering through his partially brainwashed mind, of factual aberrations in the Salinas interrogations and executions as conducted by the Colonel, his boss Diaz (still at large) and his vicious deputy Rodriguez.
So Martens’ account is not an abject confession but an attempt to set out the facts as he saw them. The stolid amorality of the tone lends the novel a curious power. “No one believed that Salinas, whose name was given the Uprising, could be a traitor. The Colonel did indeed later have cause to regret that we made news of Salinas’s execution public; without a doubt it triggered a moral backlash, far too big and still quite unnecessarily. Still, if we had not issued a communiqué, then we would have been accused of seeking to mislead and of violating the law.”
Salinas, owner of an established chain of departmental stores, is a mild opponent of the regime that has come to power after a coup. But in the climate of fevered suspicion and insecurity that afflicts all regimes that lack popular support, he is vested with nefarious intent far beyond his inclinations or activities. Intelligence reveals the possibility of a major uprising from somewhere and the Colonel and his boys are under pressure to produce perpetrators. The Salinas executions, thus, were retrofitted on to an ephemeral cause.
Salinas provides a perfect target. His weakness is Enrique, a hot-headed brat packer obsessed with youthful ideals of heroism. To invest his rich, idle life with “meaning” and romance, Enrique starts liaising with opponents of the regime, notably university mavericks, who may or may not have been informers. It was this association and his father’s attempts to divert him that eventually precipitate their tragic end.
Kertész is able to convincingly recreate the chilling power of dictatorships because he is uniquely positioned to do so. Hungarian by birth, he was imprisoned in the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II.
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Like Eli Wiesel’s Night, this slim work of fiction is a significant reminder of the perils of authoritarianism in any form. It is an important read for proponents of POTA as much as for George W’s neocons.
DETECTIVE STORY
Imre Kertész
Harvill Secker
£12.99; 128 pages