Review - 'Pleasured' by Philip Hensher

Pleasured by Philip Hensher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


New Year's Eve. The year is 1988, soon to be 1989. A car breaks down on the transit road between Berlin and the West German border. The driver is an Englishman named Peter Picker. The two passengers he's taking back to West Berlin from Christmas visits to their respective families are: Friedrich Kaiser, layabout, part-time bookstore employee and frequenter of dubious nightclubs; and Daphne, nee Charlotte, student and political agitator, whose boyfriend Mario, a defector from the DDR, is expecting her back in West Berlin by nine-o'clock (spoiler – this doesn't happen).

These four characters, thrown together by chance, are destined to change one another's lives during what will prove to be a life-changing year all round for Germany, East and West.

Philip Hensher is so good at getting beneath the skin of his characters and detailing all the small but significant minutiae of their lives, histories and consequent attitudes within a leisurely but arresting (and occasionally hilarious) narrative. As the months pass and relationships between Picker and Friedrich, Daphne and Mario, and Friedrich and Daphne blossom, pall and then pick up again, we find out so much about life on both sides of the Berlin Wall, both as lived in reality and as imagined by those on the 'other side'. By the time political events have come to a head on 9th November 1989 – ironically, the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht - we've been party to farce, betrayal, deception and disillusionment on both a personal and political level.

The phrase 'the grass is always greener' comes to mind as the Wall falls and Berliners begin to realise that what was on the other side was always more of an idea than a reality. 'A solution has gone now. The idea of the East, it was always a solution, wasn't it?' says Friedrich as he and Picker stand in a deserted Sanssouci, former palace of Friedrich the Great in Potsdam. 'But it will be back, because we need a solution so much, we need the opposite of what we want, so that we can live our lives. So that we can say, well, our lives may not be what we want, but at least we don't have to live – over there.'

The book ends with a tragedy, and a kindness, and seems oddly applicable to these present uncertain times. Thoroughly recommended.



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