As I started reading Alice Jolly’s new novel, whose narrator is a mute autistic girl in wartime Vienna, I realised that I was resisting its very premise. I am generally sceptical about books that use child narrators to add poignancy to dark plots, or novels that use nazism as a means of introducing moral jeopardy to their characters’ journeys. And yet by the end Jolly had won me over. This is a book that walks a tightrope between sentimentality and honesty, between realism and imagination, and creates something spirited and memorable as it does so.
We meet our fierce narrator, Adelheid Brunner, when she is brought into a children’s hospital by her grandmother, who cannot cope with the little girl’s fixations. Adelheid is obsessed with the matchboxes of the title, which she is constantly studying, ordering and occasionally discarding. In the hospital, she finds that she and her fellow child inmates are the object of obsessive study in turn by their doctors – sometimes understood, sometimes valued, and then, tragically, sometimes discarded.
Adelheid sees how certain disabilities spark particular interest from one of the key doctors, Dr A, who is intrigued by the children he calls his “little professors”. This, we come to understand, is Dr Hans Asperger, whose research in the Vienna children’s hospital in the 1930s laid the groundwork for the understanding of autism.
Adelheid works out how she needs to present herself in order to thrive in this milieu: to show that she is valuable and not to be discarded. “One can put on the coat of a Life,” she realises, “and perhaps change for another garment when the need arises.” She is able to leave the hospital for a time, and watch the rise of nazism from her position as a waitress in her grandmother’s crowded cafe, returning as a ward assistant during the dark years of the second world war.
While the narrative is pretty impressionistic at times, Jolly is clearly trying to keep to the historical reality of this hospital. This was indeed where staff carefully observed their patients, but it is also where, during the war, decisions were taken to send many of them to another clinic, where they were subjected to medical experiments or murdered.
I’m no expert on this harsh corner of history, but it had recently sparked my interest after reading Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger. Klein also explores the way that the Vienna children’s hospital under Asperger became a “key node in the system of sorting who would live and who would be murdered”. Klein dissects Asperger’s shift from care to callousness, from curiosity to murder, in order to ask how we can resist that shift right now. As a novelist, Jolly is less interested in the bigger lessons and more interested in the moment-by-moment anguish and chaos of those times. But there is a synergy between Klein’s work and Jolly’s, both of whom seem to be on a journey to identify what makes us human and what destroys that humanity.
Adelheid is not a straightforward guide on that journey. As the novel begins, the Reich’s ostensible love of order appeals to her. When the Germans march into Vienna, she is ready for them: “My flag is already positioned in a vase on the windowsill and I also have a most shiny tin badge.” She recognises its darker side slowly, as its cruel and arbitrary threats – including to her own survival – unfold.
Nobody ever hears Adelheid speak, but her inner voice is wild. In fact, her delivery can be so chaotic, with its constant distractions and random capitalisations, that at first I struggled to settle into her point of view. But gradually I warmed to her, and her restless, needling observations. She gives us moments of true jeopardy – hiding from Nazis, running from murder – and stretches of poignant ordinariness. In the end, Adelheid’s joy in this ordinariness adds up to a great paean to the humanity that the Nazis wanted to destroy: “The World vastly varied and luminous and brilliant. Everything separate and known and entirely beautifully brilliantly itself.”
At times, Jolly becomes too invested in her own research, so the narration occasionally jumps around, leaving Adelheid’s point of view to cross centuries and continents in order to explore Asperger’s legacy and how his actions are seen by others. That makes the book a little baggy. But in the end, Jolly manages to mould all her fragments together into a distinctive narrative, which brings both the darkness of nazism and the courage of those who tried to resist it very close to the reader.
• Natasha Walter’s next book, Feminism for a World on Fire, will be published by Little, Brown in May 2026. The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
