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Sue Green

The Song Before it is Sung

by Justin Cartwright

Bloomsbury, HK$241

As so many writers and the creators of blockbuster 'true story' movies about great moments in history have discovered, blending fiction with fact is a tricky business.

Not only will this new version  of events be judged on its literary merits - no great problem given Justin Cartwright's considerable  skill as a writer - but it will also be scrutinised on its worth as a version of history, its success in blending fact and fiction and - potentially most controversially - whether  the writer, having added imagined facts and left out others, has made inappropriate changes and showed a lack of respect for people and events. Has he, in effect, played fast and loose with history?

The merits of The Song Before It  Is Sung as a work of fiction are clear. South African-born, London-based Cartwright  richly deserves the numerous accolades his work has garnered - including being short-listed for the Booker  for In Every Face I Meet (1995). Here, he justifies his reputation with a dense, richly textured and complex work, not  a light or easy read but one that, although at times verging on the ponderous, rewards time and effort.

Cartwright has tackled a large and difficult subject. On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death when an assassin's bomb failed to kill him in his bunker at the Wolf's Lair, his eastern command.

Among the conspirators who were hunted down and hanged slowly from meat hooks was Adam von Trott, an anti-Nazi and the son of a Prussian aristocrat who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford  in the 1930s. While in London, von Trott, a German patriot, met the Jewish intellectual Isaiah Berlin  and the  pair became friends.  They fell out when von Trott wrote to a  British newspaper defending the treatment of Jews in German courts under the Third Reich.

Cartwright creates a fictionalised version of this relationship: his von Trott, Axel von Gottberg, is a man passionate about 'saving' Germany, while his fictional Berlin is an Oxford professor, Elya Mendel.

Mendel comes to believe that von  Gottberg has self-serving motives and could not have written such a letter without compromising himself. He alerts the Allies to  his doubts.

Cartwright's entree to this story is via  Conrad Senior, a former student of Mendel, who bequeaths him   his papers and letters. Mendel  has clearly been wracked with  guilt  about his actions. 'It may  be that if I hadn't warned my  friends in America and here about Axel's notion of himself as a world historical figure ... the Allies would have given more support to the  July plotters. And it may be that  Axel would have been spared  his appalling death,' he writes  to Senior.

Mendel drops a bombshell:   a film was made, not only of the  trial but of the hangings. It's believed lost, he says.  Senior  resolves to find it.

Cartwright interweaves Senior's somewhat lacklustre and irritating  story - he has spent his book advance and is short of money;  his idea for a play about a final meeting between von Gottberg and Mendel has not been taken up; his agent thinks he's obsessed; and  his marriage is in trouble - with his search for understanding about the events of the past.

Cartwright follows closely the actual trajectory of the relationship between von Trott and Berlin. He merges real people, places and events with those that are purely  his own creation and others that are a hybrid of the two.

In particular, he sticks to history in his account of the plot and von Trott's role in it. In an afterword, he writes: 'I have been very conscious of the obligation to the known facts of these terrible events - and an obligation to those who have helped me - to be true at the very least to  the spirit of what I have discovered in London, Oxford and Berlin. The events of that day, 20 July, 1944,  and Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg's heroic attempt to rid the world of Hitler I have reproduced as faithfully as I was able.'

But ultimately this is a work of fiction. Cartwright  has said that for him the most interesting thing isn't what actually happened but the attempt to understand why Hitler wasn't eliminated, and why Nazism took hold so quickly. 'I am not claiming - if there is such a thing - any incorrigible historical truth.'



The Song Before it is Sung