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Reviews
Darkness Rising, (Century. 2009)
Readers of Frank Tallis's detective novels are familiar with the under-current of anti-semitism pervading Viennese society at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In Darkness Rising, the fourth in his series, The Liebermann Papers, this motif becomes more prominent.
Indeed, it is the principal theme of the book, and it is seen largely through the eyes of the Jewish community in Vienna, all the way from the assimilated professional and wealthy middle class to the Hassidic community, and immigrants and refugees from Galicia and the Ukraine.
Along the road we learn a good deal about the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, and the criminal investigation is complicated by suggestions of the possible involvement of a golem, a violent monster conjured up by magical rites.
The murders are if anything more grisly than usual, but they are finally solved, again as usual, by close co-operation between Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt and young Doctor Max Liebermann.
Powerful anti-semitic forces associated with the Catholic Church and Mayor Lueger's Town Hall seek to exploit the crimes, and an ill-judged action on the part of Liebermann himself, but Rheinhardt moves firmly to counter them, not only because of his own sympathies being liberal, but also because the authorities, from the Emperor downwards, attach the highest importance to avoiding communal tension and preserving public order.
Tension and suspense are maintained admirably, and the identity of the murderer is concealed until the very end of the novel - but at some cost to psychological credibility.
Darkness Rising is in fact rather less subtle and more formulaic than its predecessors.
The corrupt Stadtrat Schmidt is a caricature of a Christian Social thug, and we see too little here of the private side of the engaging Rheinhardt, or of the enigmatic Miss Lydgate, Liebermann's apparently unattainable object of desire.
Decidedly on the plus side, however, we learn more about Max Liebermann himself, and we are introduced to Liebermann's entertaining, worldly and faintly disreputable uncle Alexander, on a well-observed visit Liebermann pays with his father to still-Austrian Prague.
Recommendation: Read! Not only for the plot, but also as a further insight into the emotional development of Max Liebermann.
Robin O'Neill
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