Caging Skies

Christine Leunens

RHNZ Vintage

Otago Daily Times, August 30th 2008

“The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.  They escape the liar’s grip like seeds on the wind, sprouting a life on their own…extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive.”

The opening lines of Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies are more like poetry than prose.  This conceptual clarity and linguistic precision is maintained through the first half of the novel, in which we meet Austrian schoolboy Johannes Betzler at the start of WWII.  As a proud member of Hitler Youth, his destiny is to ensure the future of the Aryan race, and when he discovers that his parents are hiding a young Jewish girl, Elsa, within the walls of his own home, he knows it is his duty to kill her.  Yet as he prepares to strike he finds he cannot, for his disgust towards her is mixed with a fascination that quickly deepens to a jealous, obsessive love.  Rather than confront or denounce his parents, he keeps her existence (and his knowledge of it) a secret, and when first his father and then his mother are taken by the Germans, she becomes his responsibility completely. The claustrophobic and increasingly desperate atmosphere of occupied Vienna is almost tangible, and it is easy to understand and sympathise with Johannes, both for his Fascist ideals and his infatuation with Elsa.

The tone and narrative of second half of the novel is much more diffuse and surreal, dealing with the decade that follows the end of the war, news of which Johannes keeps from Elsa of lest she choose to freedom over (his) love.  Now he must not only hide her from the world, he must hide the world from her; a deception in which she may be equally complicit and one that traps him as inexorably as it does her. Years pass in the space of a single sentence, Elsa expands physically and emotionally, becoming a bloated, monstrous figure, while Johannes becomes less and less able to deal with anything outside their house.  His life crumbles literally and metaphorically as he sells of his possessions piece by piece to pay for her upkeep, and it is no longer clear who is the keeper and whom the kept.

In the light of the recent revelations about Josef Fritzl and his daughter’s 24 year incarceration, Caging Skies seems eerily prescient, and this part of the novel not quite longer so fanciful.   Certainly it presents a fascination psychological study in self-justification.  Leunens has an ear for language and the ability to create a vividly sensual world for her characters that I found highly satisfying.  Individually, the two halves of the novel are captivating reading, although I found their juxtaposition jarring and wonder if they would have been better presented as individual parts.  For all that, the story sowed its own seeds in my imagination and I found it much more satisfying in my remembering than during the original reading.  So much so that I genuinely look forward to what this newly adopted New Zealand author produces next.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/fascinating-study-self-justification