The Defenders

IT is almost impossible not to describe this novel in blurb-like phrases of a Balzac completeness or an enormous canvas, for it is a novel on a gigantic scale. Austria before the Anschluss, with its diverse and contradictory forces, the Heimwehr, the Nazis, the bewildered government, the socialist workers, the hopeless apostles of the status quo — all these are sharply drawn in terms of individuals. Thus a book which is primarily a social document justifies itself as a novel. For the individuals are real and convincing. They wander through the contusion of their private destinies, partly the prey of forces which surround them, partly the prey of their own small weaknesses and prejudices. They prove nothing and accomplish nothing. They are cowardly or heroic — it hardly matters which. The beginning, middle, and end of them are nothingness. Some achieve integrity of spirit, but it does not avail them anything in accomplishment. They are individuals overwhelmed in a hopeless tide — like refugees machine-gunned on a dark road. Yet each one of them is real — a person like you or me. And that is why the bemused reader at the end of this long story says, ‘ Perhaps I have just read a great human document; perhaps there is more here than any novel should tell us; perhaps in this unhappy wisdom is the sad answer to our brash talk and self-importance.’ The author has led you a long way. Whither?