ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’m late to the party with this one, which was nominated for the 2019 Booker Prize, the Goldsmith Prize, the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Since The Man Who Saw Everything was published in 2019, Deborah Levy has released another novel called August Blue, (reviewed at The Guardian here.)

Everybody‘s read and reviewed Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything already: Brona at This Reading Life; Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best; Madame Bibliophile who reviewed it for A Novella A Day in May and a heap of the good people I follow at Goodreads including Paul Fulcher.  But it was a conversation about the Writer’s Prize at Messenger’s Booker which prompted me to check up on my reserve at the library, which I’d placed in May 2023 after reading Madame Bibliophile’s review. Hmpf, the reserve had ‘expired’, so I promptly reserved it again at my local library and it came through for me within the week.

The Man Who Saw Everything is as good as everybody says, and I agree that ‘the less said about it, the better’ because there’s a plot twist half way through whose impact would be spoiled if readers know about it in advance.  So I shall confine myself to the first part of the book which is about as conventional as Deborah Levy gets in this novel…

Beatles Abbey Road Album cover (Wikipedia)

In 1988 the young historian Saul Adler is about to set off for East Berlin in the GDR, when he is hit by a car on the Abbey Road.  Yes, the famous Beatles’ album one. So famous that his girlfriend Jennifer Moreau, a photographer destined to become famous, has staged the same photo, dragging along a step ladder to get the vantage point correct and holding up the traffic herself because she doesn’t have the police there to do it for her, like the Beatles did in 1969.

Saul isn’t badly hurt, and, still confused and hurt that Jennifer has dumped him, off he goes to the GDR to research resistance to fascism before the rise of Hitler.  It is two months before the Fall of the Wall, but this glimpse of daily life in East Berlin gives no hint of that except for Saul’s prescient comments to his translator Walter Müller and Walter’s sister Luna, but neither of them believe him anyway because of the ubiquitous surveillance and the probability that they are being set up by the Stasi. Only the (alert) reader will wonder, how does he know that?

Saul has permission to enter the GDR because he had…

…promised to engage sensitively in a paper [he] would write about the realities of everyday life in the GDR.  Instead of the usual cold-war stereotypes, [he] would focus on education, health care and housing for all its citizens. (p.17)

We already know that Saul is an unreliable narrator, but at this stage of the novel we take on trust that this promise meets with his father’s approval because he is an unreconstructed socialist who has modelled his family life on authoritarian regimes:

In his view, freedom of speech and movement were not as important as eliminating inequalities and working for the collective good, but then he could catch the ferry to France any time he liked and no one was going to shoot him from a watchtower in Dover. He turned a blind eye to the Soviet tanks rolling through Prague in 1968 because he obviously thought we were related to Stalin.

‘The Soviet Union is the GDR’s godfather.  Family must look after each other and protect their kin from reactionary adversaries.’

Yeah yeah yeah. (p.17)

That allusion to the Beatles’ trademark ‘Yeah yeah yeah’ is indicative of the way Levy’s symbols echo throughout the book, foreshadowing events that are linked but only become apparent as the novel progresses.

The political awareness shown in this excerpt and others like it are probably why the novel was nominated for the George Orwell prize. Both Luna and Walter Müller (without being aware of his penchant for betrayal) become Saul’s lovers, and this is probably why the novel was nominated for the Lambda.  The structure and the games of time and place are probably why it was nominated for the Goldsmith, but the nomination for the Booker is probably just because The Man Who Saw Everything is an entertaining book that manages to be thought-provoking and timely as well.

I also enjoyed reading this profile of Levy in The Guardian.

Author: Deborah Levy
Title: The Man Who Saw Everything
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2019
Jacket image: Tamara Lichtenstein
ISBN: 9780241268025, hbk, 200 pages
Source: Kingston Library

Image credit: Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover: By https://open.spotify.com/album/0ETFjACtuP2ADo6LFhL6HN, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4897516