Fiction | August | Alfred Birney | De Geus, €25.49 | 272 pages.
August is the title of Alfred Birney’s acclaimed new novel, which centres on a Dutch teacher suspected of sexual abuse of a pupil.
It is already ten years since the writer Alfred Birney, who turns 75 this month, published his impressive novel The interpreter of Java published. The book was awarded the Libris Literature Prize and the Henriette Roland Holst Prize, and marked his definitive breakthrough to the wider public – it became a bestseller. But shortly afterwards, he was admitted to hospital following a heart attack and had to undergo bypass surgery. His recovery took a long time, but his stay in hospital did result in a novel, On hold (2020), an inner monologue by a man lying in a hospital bed awaiting an operation.
Birney is very good at writing a compelling stream of consciousness. His new novel, too, August, the successor to On hold, is in fact one long monologue by a first-person narrator, a tangle of memories and events that are seamlessly woven together.
The narrator is Augustus Kroos, known as August or Guus for short, named after the day on which he was abandoned as a baby. August is a Dutch teacher at a secondary school, but he has been suspended because the boyfriend of his pupil Tara, who was receiving private tuition from him, claims to have found them together in bed. That’s true, says August, but it wasn’t what it looked like: he and Tara had watched a film after the tuition session and had fallen asleep. He also claims that the allegation that he subsequently forced the boy out of the house is untrue; the boy is simply very jealous. But then, as a grown man, you’re at a disadvantage, and so August is sitting at home, having to put his statement in writing for a mediator. He has little faith that it will help him keep his job, as public judgement has already been passed. And so August doesn’t hold back; his defence statement, limited to ten pages, turns into a diary.
This is how we come to know a man who has been displaced since birth. Abandoned as a foundling, raised in a boarding school and having also spent time in a reformatory – it transpires he had previously been accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Vile phrases such as ‘On a cold Sunday we were baptised (…), whilst the churchgoers, in their fine Sunday best, stared at us with icy disdain as if we were bound for hell’ beautifully illustrate the backdrop to his existence.
August looks back with nostalgia on his lost love, Kasia, whom he let go because she wanted children and he did not. Kasia married another man and died shortly after the birth of her child. ‘I still believe that Kasia would not have died prematurely if I’d stayed with her,’ writes August. In his isolation, he has taken up his old hobby again: keeping catfish in an aquarium. This enigmatic creature, which often symbolises the subconscious and the will to survive, but in Birney’s work also represents the longing for love and the unattainable, inscrutable woman. Then, in defiance of the restraining order, Tara reappears too. And this well-written, entertaining story takes a surprising turn.
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