Mr Schnitzel by Stephen Knight 240pp, Viking, £10.99
Stephen Knight is one of Britain's best, if undervalued, poets. His first collection, Flowering Limbs , was an impressive, appropriately surreal account of adolescence; Dream City Cinema a dazzling hymn of entropy. In his first novel, an apparently autobiographical remembrance of his childhood, Knight expresses himself in a different medium without losing any of his effectiveness.
Mr Schnitzel contains two narratives. The main text consists of seven fairy-tales told to Stephen by his father, "stories for a five-year-old unsettled by sleeping in a strange bed in a strange country". The footnotes, which form the other narrative, relate the reasons for that situation. Stephen's mother is Austrian, regretful that she ever left that country and returning every summer; his father is Welsh, and his job often prevents him joining his wife and child until later in the holiday. Father and son are monoglots, and the fairy stories -magical tales of past Austrian naval triumphs - transfigure the baffling country, compensate for the father's absence and obliquely transform family members into fable. The footnotes unfold Stephen's memory of his only adult trip to Austria, revisiting the haunts of his dislocated childhood summers.
These aren't the subversive footnotes of Nabokov, nor the essays on minima of Nicolson Baker; they are contextualisations that seem digressive but show the way home. "I rarely bothered with footnotes in the past - their whiff of pedantry, the way they interrupt the narrative," Knight writes in a preface. "So you can imagine my surprise when they began to grow from the bottom of the page, rising up, until they became as important an act of retrieval as the tales themselves." The act of re-reading his childhood, retrieving it, is what Mr Schnitzel is all about; and it is a moving, often comic, heart-rending process.
Photographs are one aid to remembrance, fables another. Both can fade or fail: "I could never master fixatives," confesses one fairy-tale character, apologising for his disappearing portraits even as he himself vanishes. Meanwhile, the photographs Stephen's father takes pile up in boxes, unlabelled and thus "slipping away, mere curiosities, vanishing in front of me for want of a scribble on the back that said who and when they were".
Holding on or letting go; the core of the narrative is Stephen's mother's decline into grief, alcoholism and madness. The fairy-tales allow the young Knight to mythologise his odd parents; the footnotes show him coming to terms with events. While his mother cannot let go of the homeland she wishes she had never left, Knight can only recover the broken pieces as an adult, after a childhood of denial and incomprehension.
There is no attempt to be tricksy about the unreliability of the narrative: it is simply unknowable, years on, what is genuinely remembered and what has been transformed in memory. It is the endeavour that is important: the acts of restoration and forgiveness. There is a real sadness to this novel, but also a great deal of affection, humour and love.
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