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Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann review – plague, war and practical jokes
Tue 18 Feb 2020 07.00 GMT
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Not so Tyll. Set in early 17th-century Europe, it takes place during the thirty years’ war, a sectarian power struggle over the Holy Roman Empire, which ravaged Germany and left millions dead. Wikipedia wormholes await the reader unfamiliar with, say, the battle of Zusmarshausen, the poet Martin Opitz, or indeed the novel’s eponymous hero, lifted from a 16th-century folk tale about a lawless practical joker who roams the land exposing hypocrisy (Michael Rosen once adapted the story).
Kehlmann establishes Tyll as a flesh-and-blood figure by giving him tragic origins. We’re shown his tough village boyhood as the son of an intellectually curious miller whose interest in infinity – “the fact that to every number you can add another, as if there were no God to stem such a tide” – spells doom when witch-hunting Jesuits turn up from England in the wake of the gunpowder plot.
Kehlmann puts us deftly inside Tyll’s fretful mind. “When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person?” he wonders, eyeing his pregnant mother, Agneta. When she goes into labour as they are taking flour to the next village, the boy is ordered to wait alone while she turns back. Terrified, deep in a forest with their donkey, he worries she’ll find out that he’s wet himself.
Although he’s brought to life with plausibly universal detail, the point isn’t that Tyll could be any boy. Far from it: when he’s eventually discovered in the forest, he’s coated in flour, wearing the donkey’s scalp; it’s a grotesque portent of his future as an agent of chaos who, refusing the cards he’s dealt, tosses them in the air.
Yet just as we settle down for a character-centred picaresque, the novel shifts into an episodic hopscotch through the royal politicking behind the continent-wide bloodshed. When Tyll leaves his village with a vagabond balladeer to become a travelling player, he’s relegated to the novel’s margins, as the focus falls on a series of real-life historical figures, including Elizabeth Stuart, granddaughter of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her ill-fated husband, Frederick, King of Bohemia.
Like recent Black Death novels by James Meek and Oisín Fagan, Kehlmann’s portrait of bygone dark times both indulges and disrupts the apocalyptic turn in present-day commentary on current affairs. You could see Tyll as an attempt to politicise his usual man-of-genius trope, even if the anti-authoritarian spirit he embodies is hardly democratic – at one point, a villager recalls the mayhem his visit unleashed: “We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted … we understood that we would never be such people”.
Constructed as a string of disconnected, slyly contradictory vignettes, the fable-like narrative darts airily around with vivid detail and neat comic timing, treating the cast, and our attention, as playthings. It’s intricate and cleverly done, but not entirely satisfying: nothing in the book matches the spellbinding opening third, and ultimately it has the air of a slightly self-denying experiment – as if Kehlmann sought to test his skill by doing without the novel’s single most interesting character.
• Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (trans by Ross Benjamin) is published by riverrun (£18.99).
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