Book review: At Dawn, Two Nightingales by Alan Bilton

Niall Griffiths

What a strange, intriguing, alluringly bizarre book this is. It is, in the best way, a tad unhinged. If Alan Bilton has read Grimellhausen’s Simplissimus, then it’s a worthy homage; and if he hasn’t, then some odd concatenation has occurred, some kind of glitz in the matrix. Words such as ‘antic’ and ‘madcap’ are applicable here.

We’re in the Thirty Years War, it seems (that event is referenced, but, at the end of the novel, the Emperor character states ‘it’s nearly the end of the Eighteenth Century’), somewhere in eastern Europe, but exactly where is hard to pinpoint; there are references to kopecks and slivovitz, existing Czech placenames, foodstuffs like tvorog, and also the greschen (and old Austro-German currency unit). A lot of offal is eaten.

The characters talk in a strange admixture of dialects; at one point, even Runyonesque (‘toots’, ‘dame’). It’s at times redolent of Gormenghast Gothick, and at others of Rabelaisian farce.

Some of the writing is a delight: ‘Twas the hour before dawn, the ‘hour of orphans’, lonely as an insomniac’s thoughts’; or ‘cockroaches waggling their feelers as if conducting an invisible orchestra’ (that’s so good that I’m fighting the urge to pilfer it).

Bizarre

It’s a picaresque, essentially; the Falstaffian Mitrovsky is seeking the poet Nosek, author of the titular poem, a work so powerful that whoever hears it will instantly and incurably fall in love with its reciter. There are bizarre and absurd characters and events, scenes of hallucinogenic affect (and something concerning doppelgangers).

Towns are called things like O and P; ‘hamlets too small to warrant any other letters’. Much of the action, as it were, takes place in Hrůza, a town of dreams, where the Emperor appears oneirically to every townsperson.

There is a Department of Forbidden Texts and a Ministry of Cases of Extraordinary Importance but this is no Orwellian authoritarian dystopia; it has a much lighter touch than that. It’s a romp. It has moments of laugh-out-loud humour.

Inspector Honzl, epitome of the toady little bureaucrat, finds Nosek’s poem ‘sacrilegious and offensive…said to mock the Emperor…in a most crude and offensive manner. Some said that the two birds of the poem referred to his mistress’s breasts; others that they related to the size and colour of his Imperial Majesty’s balls’.

Power vacuum

The poem itself is a constant background shadow, a chimera, almost grail-like; perhaps a quest for meaning and anchor and beauty in a power vacuum (out of which burst the Thirty Years War, if that is, indeed, the novel’s period).

We are never given lines from the poem (although singing is abundant), but we do have, in a quite moving paragraph, a summation: ‘some spoke of a tender love song, a sweet, soft ache in the soul; others recalled a melancholy lament of regret, a bitter accounting of all the misfortunes of life, laced with sorrow and loss.

And still others claimed that the words held a secret revolutionary meaning, instigating a kind of revolution or call to arms….But all agreed that it was the most beautiful music in the world’.

The search for the magic of art will lead you through both joys and horrors, and may be ultimately fruitless, but it is never pointless.

The novel is much too long and is begging for a more ruthless editor, but it’s a wild and exciting ride nonetheless; enjoy the set pieces, the leaping dialogue, the rainbow characters. It’s a journey you’ll be glad to undergo.

At Dawn, Two Nightingales by Alan Bilton is published by Watermark Press. It is available from all good bookshops.