Do you see how things can turn out? Do you see that the world is big enough to make certain things possible? That thirty-six years ago the German Student Union could hold a rally in Opernplatz, Berlin, and burn twenty-five thousand books, many written by Jews, the students rejoicing in their festival of loathing, and now this, in Hometown. Hannah’s bookshop of the broken hearted, a thing of beauty.
In a letter from the author at the beginning of my ARC of The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, Robert Hillman explains that the two main characters in the novel are based, vaguely, on people he knew in the small Australian town where he grew up (that town, vaguely, represented here as the fictional “Hometown”). The local bumpkin Tom Hope is based on a young farmer Hillman knew as a kid, and the exotic foreigner, Hannah Babel, is based on a music teacher who arrived at his high school in 1961 (the era in which this book is set). Hillman fleshes out this Hannah's Holocaust survival narrative with details from two such survivors' stories that he helped to write; two women “who walked out of the gates of hell and found the courage to embrace life again”. I liked everything about Tom Hope and his struggles with work and love, I liked the idea of the slightly mad but charming Madame Babel coming to rural Australia and shaking things up with a doomed-to-fail bookshop, but as with The Tattooist of Auschwitz or even Sophie's Choice, I'm not really comfortable with modern-day novelists imagining a person's experiences in the Nazi concentration camps; I especially don't like it when a man describes what that must have been like for a woman. Bearing witness is vital – I appreciate that Hillman used his skills to help actual Holocaust survivors to capture their stories – but this felt like misguided appropriation and the flashback scenes in Auschwitz spoiled the whole thing for me. (As noted, I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
An hour before he appeared in the shop, he had been covered in muck, rounding up the sheep, shouting at cows, putting his fingers to his teeth to whistle up Beau, and now he stood with a big smile telling farmers' wives where to find the Georgette Heyers. In a shirt and tie. Polished shoes. Black slacks with a pleat down each leg. If you loved a woman, this is how you might well end up. Dear God. At midday, he kissed Hannah good-bye and skittered back to the farm with a hundred things to attend to.The book begins with the story of Tom Hope: a young man who only became a farmer when his uncle left him his spread, and as with his working life, everything just sort of happens to Tom – an unloving woman agrees to marry him, she leaves for a while, she comes back pregnant with another man's baby, Tom accepts it, she runs away again and Tom raises the toddler as his own (for a couple of years), and when she returns yet again to take the boy away, Tom can only throw up his hands and try to heal his broken heart by throwing himself harder into caring for his sheep and cows and the fields and orchards (all of this happens in the first few chapters, and it promised an intriguing and affecting story). When Hannah Babel (an older, exotically beautiful and eccentric foreigner) arrives in town and hires Tom to craft some bookshelves for her new shop, it doesn't take long for her to seduce him, and despite the large parts of herself that she keeps walled off, and despite some superior airs and an obvious intellectual mismatching, Tom accepts the relationship and they are soon married. Through alternating flashback scenes, we learn how Hannah lost her husband and son in Auschwitz, and it's understandable that she doesn't want any more children; that she never again wants to be responsible for a young life that she might not be able to protect. But when the boy that Tom still thinks of as his son escapes the commune/cult where his mother has brought him, finding his way back to Tom despite all odds, the couple is pushed to the brink – whose needs and pains will win out in this competition of the broken hearted? (At one point, Hannah gives Tom A Christmas Carol to read – she gives him several books to “improve” him, and that's about as meaningful as the presence of the bookshop gets – and Tom likes the book and especially its happy ending, “In life itself, you didn't get the chance to choose an ending; but if a writer could give Bob Cratchit a Merry Christmas, then that's what a writer should do.” I liked that Hillman acknowledged this early and it made it more intriguing to learn how he would tie up his own characters' tales.)
She came to Australia with the bookshop still in her imagination and thought: How much farther can I go? This is where I stop. A very long way west of Budapest, of Auschwitz. She had read enough to know that we cannot speak of things that are “meant to be.” If her long journey from Europe to Hometown, to Tom Hope, to the bookshop of the broken hearted was meant to be, then Mein Kampf was meant to be, and the cleansing, the säuberung of the students in Opernplatz were meant to be. She said: “Too bad about that.” Hannah's happiness was great enough to embrace contradictions. It was without doubt meant to be, this bookshop that would bankrupt her, this love for a man who would one day notice her gray hair and her wrinkles more keenly than he did now. Too bad about that. For now, a little taste of paradise.Tom and Hannah are both intriguing characters and there's plenty of potential in throwing these two mismatched and broken souls together. But while we accept that Tom is focussed, hardworking, and uncomplaining without more than a few references to his developing years, Hillman gives us Hannah's entire life story (through thoughts and flashbacks), and that feels like the author doesn't trust the reader to have an understanding of the baggage that a cosmopolitan Holocaust-survivor might be carrying with her as she flees to the furthest reaches of the Earth. It was interesting for me to read of the young men in Hometown who were itching to get conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War (I didn't realise that Australia was a major combatant, and as a Canadian, I've never read stories before of anyone who wanted to join that fight), but I don't know how realistic it was for Tom to have been portrayed as someone who had never heard of the Holocaust (because Australia had fought in the Pacific during WWII, did they really never get news from the European front? Or is this just further proof of what a bumpkin Tom himself was? Would he really not know that Jewish people don't celebrate Christmas?) I didn't like that the waiting-for-better-days character's name was Hope, that the multilingual foreigner was named Babel, or that their hometown was named Hometown, and as I started with, I really didn't like the scenes set in Auschwitz. On the other hand, there was much lovely writing here, and especially with Hannah's character, some really intriguing personality choices – she's messed up and every word and thought suggests that brokenness; it's compelling that Tom would be drawn to that. An uneven read with pluses and minuses; solid three stars.
