Book Review: Charles Palliser’s ‘Sufferance’ is a Frustrating Story that We Deserve
Want to feel good about the world? Dont read this novel
In unhappy times, people look for an escape. They want a story that will inspire them or give them hope that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Charles Palliser’s novel Sufferance is not one of those.
The best place to start is by saying what it isn’t.
Promotional materials describe it as a World War II story about a girl in hiding and the family that protects her. Don’t expect this to be like Fugitives of the Forest, A Past in Hiding, The Forest of Vanishing Stars, Catherine’s War, The Hiding Place, The Upstairs Room, The Diary of Anne Frank or any other book about people hiding from the Nazis and the courage of those who hide them.
It’s not.
High morals don’t motivate Palliser’s family. The plot turns on a small act of kindness that gets out of hand. By the time they realize they’ve made a mistake, it’s too late. They can’t back out. They must stay the course and suffer through it, which explains how Palliser came up with his title.
Why did he write this story about ignorant, selfish people? And why the heck am I reading it?
Even the small act of kindness that starts the ball rolling isn’t really kind. Palliser’s unnamed narrator lives in an unnamed European city (everything in the book is unnamed) in a country that has been invaded and occupied. He learns that the parents of one of the girls in his daughter’s school were on a trip when the invasion happened. They have been cut off by the invasion and can’t get home. The girl is living alone with a housekeeper. The narrator suggests having her stay with them until they return. So generous, right?
Not exactly.
“My position in the Department of Finance was not secure since I had no political connections with the new people in power,” explains the narrator, who’s a bookkeeper with a mediocre bureaucratic job. “My hope was that the generosity we extended towards the girl would be balanced by her father’s towards me. In short, he might offer me employment in his company since such a business needs people capable of doing the work of an accountant.”
Anyone familiar with Palliser’s work knows that such simple plans always get shot down.
If you don’t know him already, Palliser established himself as a maker of intricate puzzles with his elaborate 1989 first novel The Quincunx. A Dickens-inspired mystery set in 19th century London, that novel lures readers with an ambiguous story. The same style of storytelling there — rife with misleading information and unreliable narrators — can be found in Sufferance. The characters here are unreliable, ignorant, selfish, paranoid … and painfully naïve.
I won’t say more about how Palliser tightens the thumbscrews on the family and their secret guest or that the ending is abrupt, sad, and pathetic. But I’ll point out that — despite how my review sounds — this book is worth reading. Any practicing novelist will learn a lot (I sure as heck did). Palliser is a master at showing the subtle, gradual ways that a noose tightens around someone’s neck before they realize it’s happening.
Palliser explained in a piece on a mysteries and thrillers website that he wrote Sufferance to look at the experiences of “the vast mass of people in the countries controlled by the Axis Powers.” It’s interesting that he gets so historically specific even though the larger political-historical context of his story is so stripped down you hardly notice it.
But maybe that’s because Palliser gives us the experiences of ordinary people. The narrator doesn’t think about the big picture because most people don’t. All that matters to them is what things cost at the grocery store and gas pump or what’s going on right now inside their home’s four walls.
And that gets me to the point — thank you to those who are still reading — advertised in my title. The mindset of Palliser’s family doesn’t seem that dissimilar from the mindset of many Americans (maybe it applies to Palliser’s England, too, but I can only speak for my country) as they look at the war in Ukraine, the crisis in Gaza, or the fall presidential election. Strike that: I’m assuming they are actually thinking about these issues, but the simple fact is they aren’t. Most people don’t care.
When I finished his book, I kept asking myself, why? Why Palliser would spend time on such a depressing story about a family that is selfish, stupid, and antiheroic?
But it didn’t take much to work out an answer. All I had to do was look at the world around me. At every level, people are engaging in performative gestures that are essentially meaningless. Regardless of the time period, Palliser’s novel is a mirror for us. It reflects something about what he thinks of human nature, and I can’t help but agree. Hannah Arendt once described “the banality of evil”; in Sufferance we get the banality of heroism. Looking around today, you see that banality everywhere.
Palliser uses the unlikely setting of World War II to give us the kind of cynical story our world deserves.
