BOOK REVIEW - Intricate tapestry of ideas - The Song Before It Is Sung A Novel Justin Cartwright Bloomsbury USA: 270 pp., $24.95
AT 62, Justin Cartwright is a senior member of a masterful generation of English novelists that includes Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.
He has all that group's relevant credentials -- a novel on the Booker shortlist, five nominations for the Whitbread Prize and an admiration for Saul Bellow and John Updike. Now -- with "The Song Before It Is Sung" -- he has something more: a quiet masterpiece. Cartwright has written that rare thing, a novel of ideas intricately and propulsively plotted, deeply humane, elegantly readable.
In his previous eight novels, Cartwright has proved himself an exquisitely astringent observer of middle-class lives and mores in contemporary England. Though set in this current moment, "The Song Before It Is Sung" is fixed upon a wider canvas -- the blood-drenched 20th century -- and draws its inspiration from the real and consequential relationship between the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, and the right-wing Prussian aristocrat and anti-Nazi, Adam von Trott zu Solz. (Cartwright's title is drawn from a pointed question by one of Berlin's favorite Russian thinkers, Alexander Herzen: "Where is the song before it is sung?")
During the early 1930s, the real Berlin and Von Trott met and became friends at Oxford, which the handsome young German noble attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Their relationship suffered an irreparable breach in 1934, when Von Trott, by then working as a prosecutor in Germany, wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian denying that Jews were mistreated in his jurisdiction. His motives for that letter still are unclear. Some have argued that Von Trott acted out of a misplaced sense of Prussian duty; others that he was creating cover for his increasingly urgent anti-Nazi activities. Though he joined the Nazi Party, Von Trott did, in fact, use his diplomatic contacts to attempt to dissuade Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax from appeasement. During the war, he joined the right-wing anti-Nazi underground and took an active role in the plot that sent Catholic nobleman Claus Graf von Stauffenberg on an unsuccessful mission to assassinate Hitler. Von Trott was one of those arrested and hanged from a meat hook by a piano wire noose, their slow strangulation reportedly filmed for Hitler's later enjoyment.
