Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare
This month in the book club, the novel under discussion is Snowleg, Nicholas Shakespeare's brooding, labyrinthine love story, set in Germany from 1977 to 2002, before and after reunification.
When the unheroic hero, Peter, discovers that his father is not the Englishman to whom his mother is married but an East German rebel with whom she had a momentary affair, he decides to enrol as a medical student in Germany. During a trip to Leipzig, he falls deeply in love with a woman whose Icelandic nickname sounds to him like 'Snowleg'. She confides that she wants to flee her country and Peter promises to help - but his courage fails him and he abandons her.
Over the next 20 years he tries to forget his shame and guilt, and convince himself that he is no longer in love, but eventually after the collapse of the Berlin wall, her returns to look for her. His tandem searches, both lengthy and difficult, for a woman whose real name he doesn't know and a father whom he has never met form the heart of this intense and gloomy but fundamentally humane novel.
In his first column on the book, John Mullan investigates the ways in which Shakespeare utilises his novel's contemporary-historical setting, and examines his depiction of the East German communist regime with which the book is engaged. In his second, he investigates the novelist's manipulation of coincidence. Finally, in the third week, Nicholas Shakespeare explains the series of events that led him to decide to set his novel in the GDR. Read the columns in full here, then post your own thoughts on the book below. A selection of your posts will appear in John's final column in the paper in a week's time.
