Keith Oatley
Before we get to the standard matters of synopsis and justifications for thumbs up or thumbs down (or, just as often, a timid thumblessness), a note regarding titles. As a rule, they should try to avoid having "therefore" in them, even if they are plucked from a Biblical reference, as is the case in Keith Oatley's third novel, Therefore Choose. Same goes for "notwithstanding" and "heretofore" and "a priori." Such terms have a way of telegraphing "dry", which, while aptly applicable to Oatley's prose style, does something of a disservice to the potential of his dramatic material.
I know what you're thinking. A hundred words in and we haven't got past the title? Surely this is nitpicking (it's in the Unofficial Reviewers Code to ignore the title, right?). But for this reader, that "therefore" goes to the central lack that runs through the better part of Oatley's novel, from cover to tellingly lengthy bibliographic acknowledgments. Namely, the exercise carries the unfortunate whiff of the academic, the stodgy, the inanimate.
In one of the early conversations between the young lover protagonists of the novel (and for young lovers, boy do they talk), they discuss how a philosophical idea may best be translated into effective fiction. George suggests to Anna, "That's what a story is…A kind of dream." But there is little dreaminess in the deliberate storytelling and graduate seminar dialogue employed here. There are plenty of articulated ideas, and a brooding historical backdrop, and the kernel of moral dilemma - but few lightning bolts to bring all of it to convincing life.
Therefore Choose traces the intellectual (and, tastefully offstage, the sensual) coming-of-age of George, a student of medicine at Cambridge who wonders if the practical sciences are his proper destiny, or if his interest in more aesthetic concerns (he secretly writes short stories on the side) is closer to his heart. In his final year, he befriends Werner, a German student specializing in Wittgenstein. At the end of term, Werner invites George to visit Berlin for the summer. And that is where we meet Anna, the third point in this scholarly triangle.
Anna, an editor at a small literary journal, enters the novel wearing "men's flannel trousers that did not look out of place on her." Poor English schoolboy George is done for: German, mannish, and a thing for Goethe. A pre-War lit nerd's femme fatale.
George and Anna enjoy a 1936-in-Berlin-style summer of love, with Anna teaching him the nuances of Chekhov, and George luxuriating in coffee and sex for the first time. Mostly, though, they engage in serious discussions about art and creativity and psychology and their intersections with politics. Scenes take the form of transcripts more than enactments. Adhering to Tell over Show ("George was totally taken up in Anna's affection"), the affair is reportedly intense, but demonstrably mostly verbal. Then Werner returns from a visit to his parents and joins them. Now all three have discussions.
Of course, it being Germany in 1936, the political and history-in-the-making dimensions of Therefore Choose begin to advance themselves at the novel's midpoint, as the three's conversations turn increasingly tense as they ponder the implications of Hitler's rise. Anna invites George to stay on with her in Berlin and forego his medical training in England. As George characteristically asks himself in on-the-nose fashion: "What would it mean to stay in Germany, with its inexorable political undertow?"
You'd think it would mean conflict and crisis. And it does, though they are mildly presented. After going back and forth between Berlin and London to see each other, Anna asks George if he can commit to her, and he waffles. As tensions and violence escalate in Germany, George receives a letter stating that Anna and Werner have married. Taking this news in, "he wondered whether he was going to cry, but he did not."
The war arrives. We follow George's service in battle, his pining for Anna and horrific world events from a distance, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. And then, toward the novel's end, George and Werner are uncomfortably reunited. They discuss ideas again.
It's not, by the way, that ideas are incompatible with gripping literary products. In fact, Keith Oatley himself is the author of a notable marriage of the two in The Case of Emily V., a brainy mystery that won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1994. What that book has and what Therefore Choose mostly doesn't is seduction, the compulsion to read seriously and for pleasure at the same time.
That, and a better title.
Andrew Pyper's most recent book is The Killing Circle, which was selected a Notable Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times.