Shelf Life

THE BOOK THIEF
By Markus Zusak
Doubleday. 584 pages (but the print is very big and there are some pictures…). £10.99
ISBN 978-0-385-61147-3

Here is a book narrated by Death. It’s a story about children in war, about loss and mortality, as well as the power of words. Wow! What more could an evangelical want?

Isn’t this the perfect book to discuss with our neighbours with all the topics we want to raise? Well, yes, this is a good book, which will provoke interesting discussions, but as you’ll see below, it is not perfect.

It is 1938, nine-year-old Liesel and her brother are being taken to a family near Munich to be fostered because their Communist parents are being hounded by the Nazis. On the way her brother dies, is buried in hard, icy ground and Liesel steals a copy of The Gravedigger’s Handbook. Here Death meets Liesel for the first time and begins to tell her story, while adding his own observations and digressions.

Quickly Liesel is absorbed into Himmel (meaning ‘heaven’ — no small irony) Street, an impoverished part of town, where she makes friends, gets into trouble, starts fights and continues in her career as a thief. Liesel’s character and that of her foster parents, harridan Rosa and soft-hearted Hans, as well as the other bit-players of the street, are very credible and sympathetic.

The plot, I think, is great, with frequent strong events (a pyre of books, an apple robbery, the rescuing of a book from a freezing river) which illustrate ‘how ugly and how glorious’ humanity is. When the family takes in a Jew whose father had saved Hans’s life, the suffering of very ordinary people in Nazi Germany becomes deeply poignant. I finished this book while a pan of onions was cooking on my stove and I hope my children blamed my very watery eyes on that! (Though they are pretty used to me crying at books, normally ones I’m reading to them.)

Cynicism and sentimentality

This book has been marketed for older children/teens in some countries, and you can tell that in the writing. I found the postmodern style a bother. There is simply too much wryness and self-consciousness with sub-headings that say things like ‘A Guided Tour of Suffering’, and truly dreadful, nonsensical metaphors: hair like ‘elastic’, sky ‘a home-cooked red’.

And does the figure of Death add a depth to the suffering of these sympathetic characters, or enable new insights into mortality? No. I think this presence jars with the tragedy of so many deaths. He talks about lifting up souls in his arms, some ready to meet him, others not. He talks about how busy he is in war and how silent God is. Death in this book is a mishmash of cynicism and sentimentality — a reflection, in fact, of our culture’s approach to dying.

And what of books? Liesel learns to read, having stolen her first book, then continues to steal. Her stories soothe people in an air raid shelter, they break down barriers between neighbours and Liesel’s words bring a dying man back to life; in this book, as in so many, words are what count.

And we, as Christians, say yes, words are important, very important. We speak and write because we are made in the image of The Word, but our words cannot save us, only his can. And one day our words will be silenced before him who is in charge of both life and death.

Looking at secular books

Cynicism and sentimentality

Sarah Allen

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