Book Review - Sufferance


Charles Palliser is best known for his best-selling debut, The Quincunx, published in 1990. Sufferance, his sixth novel, is set in an unnamed country during an unspecified time of war. When his nation is invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy, a civil servant decides to shelter a thirteen-year-old girl who is at school with his youngest daughter.

The country has been split in two. Her wealthy parents have disappeared, and are presumed to be trapped in the Western zone – “unable to return or even communicate since the telephone lines had been cut and the postal service suspended.” Her elder brother is believed to be a prisoner-of-war.

The girl lives in her family’s home, alone except for a domestic servant. Initially the man imagines how grateful her wealthy parents will be for his intervention. He hopes they might reward him with a better job - her father owns the local department store - not realising that the enemy is intent on persecuting this particular “community”.

It gradually becomes clear that the girl’s life is at risk and that the man has endangered his own family by taking her in. To make matters worse, she is difficult, and her presence is swiftly resented by his two daughters and wife. The youngest refers to her as “false and contriving and snobbish.”

The man’s attempts to find her family come to nothing and it is increasingly difficult to know whom to trust. There is a growing sense of paranoia as some people try to benefit from the new regime, while others merely want to survive. Identity cards become mandatory as food rationing intensifies. The girl’s ethnic group, now known as the “protected community”, have to wear prominent badges in public, their properties are requisitioned, and they are driven to live in the “protected area” of the Old City. The man discovers to his horror that it is too late to disclose her whereabouts, and that he could be fined and detained in a labour camp for harbouring an “alien”.

The novel’s tension comes from the steady accretion of the man’s minor misdemeanours, the girl’s unawareness of the danger, and our knowledge that as the noose tightens around the family, they will eventually reach the end of the road.

Palliser’s anonymous protagonist, a basically decent man, is a cog in the machine, who makes disastrous decisions. By the end, he faces an impossible dilemma. The parallels with the Holocaust are clear but by refusing to define the war or period, Palliser suggests that these horrors could happen again, at any time. Indeed, there are genocides occurring in certain corners of the world right now. The reader is left to consider – what choices would I make?

Originally published by The Tablet