At the end of this absorbing wartime tale, Audrey Magee points readers towards the work of Hans Fallada – the "rediscovered" writer whose anti-fascist story Alone in Berlin did much to highlight an alternate view of life in Nazi Germany. Then there's an afterword entitled "What right had I to write this novel?", confirming the strange sense that Magee feels the need to justify why a middle-aged Irishwoman should be concerning herself with ordinary Germans caught up in the second world war. She shouldn't worry so much. The Undertaking, which was shortlisted for the Baileys women's prize for fiction earlier this year, feels authentic, relevant and powerful.
Of course, the belief held for decades after the war was that the everyday German citizen deserved little sympathy, complicit as they seemed in the horrors of Nazism. Certainly Magee doesn't flinch from showing the delight and entitlement the Spinell family feels at moving into the expansive apartment of a recently banished Jewish family, trying on clothes hurriedly left behind, like some gruesome echo of Goldilocks. Except, here, the three bears never come back.
The Undertaking doesn't apportion blame as much as mourn how casually the basic tenets of humanity can be tossed aside. Underpinning the narrative is the relatively straightforward – if startlingly unsentimental – love story of Katharina Spinell and Eastern Front soldier Peter Faber. They marry without having met – a means by which a man could get honeymoon leave and the woman a widow's pension – but fall in love, even though when they first encounter each other "she put her hand over her nose and mouth. He stank."
Yet for all Spinell's motherly instincts, love letters to the front and slow realisation that Germany has been duped, it's Faber who really commands our sympathy. Back on the frozen steppes of Russia, some of the scenes of desperation, filth and violence as his unit pushes towards Stalingrad are incredible. Both filmic yet utterly lacking in cliche, the economy of Magee's sentences match the simple binaries of her character's life-or-death situation. Here is a man dragging himself through the atrocity of war simply so he can see his wife and child. There is little loyalty to the Führer, only to his fellow soldiers and his young family.
The ending is unexpected but hugely rewarding, given that the novel follows ostensibly normal people who want the best parts of a dominant Greater Germany without ever considering the impact on others. In the final reckoning, Magee's Germans pay a heavy toll for such selfishness – a lesson that resonates across decades of conflict to the present day.
