CONSPIRATORS
By Michael André Bernstein
Faber & Faber, £12.99; 506pp
ISBN 0 571 22133 5
Buy the book

“A revolution can’t be squeamish about employing terror, and anyone who is afraid of shedding blood belongs with the enemies of human progress.” Is that familiar? Might it be Dostoevsky? Conrad? And what about this: “The person who said history is written by the winners was a fool. These days whoever has the loudest grievance wants to write the next chapter”?

The first of these sentiments is voiced by Hans Rotenburg, the incendiary son of a humane Jewish plutocrat, the second by Count Wiladowski, the world-weary target of the conspirators of Michael André Bernstein’s novel of the same name. Bernstein, the author of Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, an argument against the notion of “pre-determined” history, would seem to be with the Count here, but his first novel is an exploration of the tension between the two positions.

It is 1913 in Galicia, a provincial Polish outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There is revolution in the air and talk of conspiracies. The social order is set to be attacked by religious fanatics on the one hand and immature aristocratic youths on the other. For both these groups individual human life comes a long way second to the big idea in which terror plays a major part. But who is to be trusted and who is to be betrayed? And what part do Jews play in all this?

Bernstein employs a cast of some dozen characters. They range from Hans and his father, Moritz, through Asher Blumenthal, a small-time accountant who would be perfectly played by Gene Wilder, the Count’s chief spymaster Jakob Tausk who was expelled from the yeshiva of a powerful rebbe or teacher, and another “miracle” rebbe, the almost Christ-like Brugger who comes to town to foment bloodshed. These main characters are all Jewish and subject to the general anti-Semitism of the time. The events lead us up to Easter in Lemberg where the non-Jewish Count Wiladowski lives in permanent fear of assassination.

This world, so full of ideas and plots, is served up in prose as chunky as a lead-crystal decanter, and yet as alert as a beady eye. Considerable imagination goes to developing the interior lives of all the characters. Bernstein, like Wiladowski, Tausk and Brugger, has access to everyone’s thoughts and switches from one to the other convincingly, though the reader never forgets these people are fleshed-out bearers of theories. It is Robert Musil’s world but as imagined from where we are, through reading and recognition of echo.

The book moves slowly and gathers its themes together with some haste at the end. Very little happens in the first 350 pages, but because we are interested in Bernstein’s perceptions as filtered through his characters we keep going for the pleasure of negotiating them. This requires work, but the perceptions, finely if a little heavily turned, are worth it: “People want to think well of themselves before anything else . . . to have a clean conscience there is no vileness they won’t commit.”

The revolutionaries are mostly ridiculous, though that makes them no less dangerous. Marx said history repeated itself first as tragedy then as farce. Bernstein’s tale demonstrates both the truth of this and its opposite, for what appears as light Viennese comedy ends in the Somme, and at Auschwitz too. Next stop Jerusalem. What is farce for some is tragedy for others.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy