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On the surface, Cora Bender, a young married mother of an eighteen-month-old boy, seems altogether normal, even placid. She works in the office of her husband's family business, is a meticulous housewife, and generally comports herself unexceptionally. But things in the marriage bed are not so peaceful. Her husband, who likes a bit of action on Friday and Saturday nights, tries one night to spice up their sex life with a spot of oral sex. The result is startling - Cora will not, cannot, have anything more to do with him, at least willingly. She tries, but is overwhelmed by a half-recovered memory of suffocation, followed by appalling nightmares. As her marriage deteriorates, Cora becomes more desperate. At length, she arranges an outing to a crowded beach at a nearby lake. She pretends it is a family treat, but she intends to kill herself by swimming too far out and drowning. Instead, apparently gripped by the delusion that the newly-wed husband on the blanket next to hers is raping his wife, she springs on him and stabs him to death with the fruit knife that she has just used to peel an apple for her little boy. Anyone less imaginative and committed to justice than police commissioner Rudolf Grovian would have left it at that. Cora is anxious to confess and adamantly opposed to discussing her motives, if indeed she had any. She absolutely refuses to admit that she knew her victim; Grovian is not so sure. What unfolds then is an account of Grovian's dogged investigation into what lay behind Cora's appalling act, an investigation that leads into some deeply disturbing crannies in Cora's history and that of her family, one that provides a new standard for the term dysfunctional; and another, more prominent family that goes to great lengths to protect its own. Against the advice of psychiatrists, the opinion of his superiors, and even the inclination of Cora's defence attorney, Grovian perseveres until the truth emerges. The only thing more difficult than reading this novel is putting it down. The jacket copy compares Hammesfahr to Patricia Highsmith; early Minette Walters would also be an apt parallel, but Hammesfahr is perhaps even more uncompromisingly dark than either of these. It is also a tribute to the strength of Hammesfahr's vision that it survives the translation. John Brownjohn is a respected and very experienced translator from the German. It is hard to understand what went wrong here, but he has chosen to render the text into a peculiar mix of outdated American and British idiom that leaves the reader suspended over the mid-Atlantic around 1950. Never mind - try to ignore the clangers - this particular walk on the dark side is well worth the effort.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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