A
Review of Ariana Franklin's CITY OF
SHADOWS
In
Ariana Franklin's contribution to Berlin Noir, we are taken back to Berlin in
1922 for a meandering tale of deceit and corruption set against the rising
darkness that would soon swallow the city, the country and, ultimately, the
world.
The
novel kicks off with a prologue featuring a woman being thrown off a bridge
into the Landwehr Canal by a large, unseen assailant in 1920. In the first of a
couple of jumps, the first chapter begins in 1922 where a disfigured Russian
Jew named Esther who has been reduced to taking a job as secretary (and
'lover') to another Russian immigrant calling himself Prince Nick who is a
weaseling, amoral, money-grubbing, cabaret-owning, opportunist and exploiter
who is on the make and on the rise. Nick has stumbled upon a woman in a mental hospital
who he believes to be Princess Anastasia who had escaped the assassination of
her family in Russia years before. Nick doesn't particularly care if she is
royalty or not, he's going to groom her for the role and line his pockets when
the big news story breaks. However the women in question believes she is being
hunted by Russian assassins and is in terror for her life. So Esther is ordered
by Nick to take care of this woman and help with preparing the deception from
the apartment that Nick has provided for them.
The
above is the spine on which the tale hangs and this is all going on while the
Communists, Nazis are on the rise and poverty reigns in Berlin. When the bodies
start piling up, the police get involved and the tale becomes one that is hard
to pin down.
The
novel switches point of view, beginning with Esther before bouncing between her
and Nick and eventually a policeman, Schmidt, and his investigation into the
murders surrounding the attempts to eliminate the faux Anastasia.
As
intriguing as the tale is, things do get muddled and overly complex with all of
these switches in focus and main characters come and go with some regularity. Once
the focus is off first Nick, and then Esther, Schmidt claims the spotlight for
awhile. Ernst Rohm's evil presence enters into the tale when Schmidt has a
run-in with him with disastrous, tragic results which leads to the policeman -
desperate and vengeful - meekly accepting a transfer to Munich. This makes
sense as he really has no choice, but it does seem abrupt.
The
next jump in the tale is a jarring one. At the moment when the
multiple-murderer is still out there, Schmidt's wife's death has gone
un-avenged, the budding romance between Schmidt and Esther has not yet bloomed
and the mystery of Anastasia remains unresolved, the book jumps ahead 10 years to 1932. Throw in the
off-screen death of a main character and the novel begins to slide off the
rails. More murders, more deception, Nazis on the rise... all of these should
be an interesting mix. But in Franklin's hands they become, ultimately, an
uninteresting tangle. Things simply take too long to progress and constant
repetition of what has happened earlier in the book further slow things down.
The romance between Schmidt and Esther also fails to engage given the amount of
time spent on it. Finally I found myself plodding through the rest of the book
just to see how it ends. An anti-climatic close to the murder investigation and
an interesting twist at the end characterize the ying-yang aspect of the novel.
I'm
not saying that CITY OF SHADOWS is not worth your time. The story is an
intriguing one and Franklin does an excellent job of recreating 1920s/1930s
Berlin with some great period details as well as capturing the feel of that
tense time. The characters are well drawn as well. What hurts the novel is the
length as the it winds its way through history. Also, the alternating focus did
not throw this reader but others might have a problem with it.
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