“Let me tell you a story about my grandfather.”
This is the opening and closing line of Liam Pieper’s colossally compulsive novel, THE TOYMAKER, a story that has its beginnings in the Holocaust and its finale in Melbourne some seventy years after the end of World War II.
The grandfather is Arkady Kulakov, a survivor of Auschwitz, who ended up in Australia to found a successful toy making company.
His grandson, Adam, is heir to the family business, which he now runs in conjunction with his wife, Tess, a puppeteer prior to their nuptials, and presently quite the spreadsheet whiz. It is her forensic financial skills that turn up fiscal discrepancies, dollar drains brought about by Adam’s infidelities.
It’s a neat twist that Tess comes from a family that frittered away its fortune and has married into a solvent concern whose heir is courting disaster with profligate adultery and attendant blackmail.
THE TOYMAKER toys with time, running Arkady’s story back in the Camp parallel with the contemporary trajectory of Adam’s tale. Both are seeded with secrets that have germinated and are ready to flower into a troublesome crop. The reap what you sow scenario, a portent potently put in patent prose by Pieper: “The dead are tossed and tumbled by time, just like the living. No one stays the person they were buried, not for long”.
Pieper negotiates both time zones with pithy, propellant, descriptive prose and dialogue worthy of the best dramatists.
“Adam had little time for Tess’s family, particularly her father and his wife, the third Mrs Coughlin in a decade… a thin woman, wiry and yoga fit, but turgid with old money pretension and creaking socialist politics that were unbecoming on a woman of advancing years……….
The nephews had the excitable inbred quality that lurked inside all Irish… the snuggle toothed, rough finished pug look that suggested they’d been hacked out of a parboiled potato.”
Arkady’s take on the architects of the Holocaust is flippantly succinct, “The Third Reich was a bunch of chicken farmers and thugs with delusions of grandeur.”, while his appraisal of Russian literature contains a similar frippery,“Chekhov good, Tolstoy despicable- Anna Karenina an 800 page pamphlet on agricultural reform and an argument about caviar by the most boring people to ever learn French.”
Both dovetail into his observation of the country that gave him succour: “It’s a strange part of the Australian character that you make suffering a competitive sport. There’s a Catholic heart to this country and a Protestant head which is why you have no idea who you are. It is particularly Protestant foolishness to think you can be more miserable than a Russian.”
THE TOYMAKER is a compulsively readable collision between the past and the present that results in a surprising future. Secrets and survival, optimism and opportunism are the kindle that fuels this funny, furious and unforgettable book.
“They say there are no atheists at the end of a gun. Perhaps, but I can tell you that there are no gods in the middle of a war.”
THE TOYMAKER by Liam Pieper is published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Featured photo- Australian author and journalist Liam Pieper.
http://liampieper.com/about-me/