Ferdinand von Schirach’s latest German hit, The Girl Who Wasn’t There, is an enigmatic, absorbing little book. The author, a defence lawyer, is best known here for The Collini Case, the story of a young lawyer representing a man who admits a brutal murder but won’t say why he did it. Clever and disturbing, opening horrifically as Von Schirach’s murderer stamps on his victim’s head until the heel of his shoe comes off, The Collini Case was a huge bestseller in Germany and climbed the charts here too.
The Girl Who Wasn’t There is a slower burn. The first half tells of the childhood of Sebastian von Eschburg, growing up neglected on his crumbling family estate, eight before he is allowed to eat with his parents, transfixed by his father’s gutting of a deer on a hunt.
Sebastian is not only lonely but different, seeing the world through the spectrum of a vast overlay of colours: “His nanny’s hands were cyan and amber; his hair, as he saw it, shone violet with a touch of ochre; his father’s skin was a pale greenish blue.” And he doesn’t fit in; he observes the world, rather than participating in it, trying to understand how people work, what is real and what is not. As an adult, this works to his benefit when he becomes an increasingly acclaimed photographer but the images he creates become darker and darker – coldly clinical swipes at art and porn and beauty and reality.
“He felt her skin on his, and thought of the colour of hollyhocks … All he knew was that he would hurt her,” Von Schirach writes, and has Sebastian’s girlfriend tell him: “I often think part of you is missing. You’re not in a good way.”
Then he is accused of the murder of a teenage girl, and the novel leaps into a different gear, moving from Sebastian’s perspective to that of the public prosecutor, and of the defence lawyer who winds up with his case. The girl’s body is missing and Sebastian, by now a famous artist, is enigmatic and deadpan in the face of questioning.
It is a jarring shift. We have seen Sebastian grow up, and for all the hints dropped about his dark side, Von Schirach – via Anthea Bell’s elegant translation – has created a strangely sympathetic antihero. It is impossible not to be touched by the image of the child, dropped by his distant mother at the train station on the way to his Swiss boarding school. “Sebastian got out, kissed her through the open window, and lifted his case from the back seat. She can’t wave goodbye because of all the traffic, he thought as he watched her drive away.” Or by his silent, desperate pleas for understanding: “‘You must help me,’ he tells his girlfriend. ‘With what?’ she asked. He couldn’t explain that he thought in images and colours, not in words. He couldn’t tell her about the gunshot in the house by the lake, or the knife cutting into the belly of the deer. Not yet.”
So we have, in Von Schirach’s ice-cool, effortlessly classy prose, an antihero accused of murder, who sees the world in too-vivid colour, and his bumptious defence lawyer, who sees everything in shades of grey. It makes for a disconcerting mix of build-up and anticlimax, tension and humour, lies and truth, and a novel as intriguingly eccentric as its protagonist.
The Girl Who Wasn’t There is published by Little Brown (12.99). Click here to buy it for £9.99
