Uprooted by WWII, a strange group of sick refugees quarantined by
the Soviets in southern Poland perplexes an innocent Scottish
doctor, but a lack of historical perspective soon puts him out of
his depth: a curious, split-screen debut from Edinburgh author
Wallace. It's no fault of Rob Watts, fresh from med school in
Glasgow in the first winter after the war, that he's too nice and
nave for the grim work of screening refugees, first in a medical
camp in Berlin under the direction of senior physician Arthur, a
burly American with inscrutable designs. Rob makes a go of it,
playing bridge in his off-hours and humoring Arthur, his roommate,
who cries himself to sleep nightly. Yet when the American sends him
to Poland, where in the cellars of a ruined estate a steady number
of the ethnic Germans who occupy the refugee camp die mysterious,
rapid, horrible deaths, Rob is completely baffled. The Soviet
doctor at the camp, an English-speaking, cultured man, hopes to
while away the hours playing chess with Rob as they study the
disease, though Rob finds another diversion, in the supple young
form of one of the refugees. When Arthur arrives on the scene with
his crackpot intensity, however, he produces a startling
hypothesis, which explains both the disease and the parallel plot
involving a once prosperous German town and the devastating Thirty
Years War of the 17th century: the refugees are directly linked to
the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and their deaths are the
revisit of an ancient curse first set in motion at the end of that
long war, almost 300 years before. Unfortunately, with no evidence
other than what Arthur, a less than reliable source, can offer,
Wallaces two plots don't connect, and poor Rob, a hand-wringing,
pleasure-seeking lightweight, has precious little to contribute
whether they do or not. (Kirkus Reviews)
Pungent tales of World War Two converge with more distant memories
of the Thirty Years War in this powerful, compelling debut novel.
The year is 1946. The war is over. A young British army doctor
finds himself ordered to investigate a curious plague in a Polish
refugee camp. What he finds there is deeply unsettling and
harrowing... Meanwhile, a colleague is much more concerned with
unravelling uncannily similar events three hundred years old,
events twisted by the centuries into their current, misshapen form,
as the fairy-story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin... Set in the
Borderlands between Germany and Poland, this powerful first novel
is reminiscent in mood, complexity and accomplishment of Pat
Barker's World War One trilogy or Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong.
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