Overtly Jewish themes dominate Marcel Möring’s prize-winning first novel, Mendels Erfenis (Mendel’s Inheritance, 1990) and his third, In Babylon (1997). This, his second, he has described as ‘an urban novel, like a road movie’. In each of his novels, he claims in the same interview, ‘I try to take a new step in my development...—Not only the subject but also the style is completely different’. There are continuities, however. Jewish folktales are related at climactic points in The Great Longing and open up the story’s meaning. And while the writing might not be quite as poetical as in the first novel, it is a bravura performance with some telling similes. A red Chevrolet crossing flat potato fields is ‘a matchhead gliding slowly over a vast expanse of flint’; at the limits of a provincial town there is ‘an endless, bumpy field under a network of greenish brown plants that looked like dead octopuses’. It is very much a young man’s novel full of leisurely atmospheric descriptions, philosopical and political discussions at midnight and after to solemnly tease out ‘the meaning of life’. That Möring makes it work nonetheless is a tribute to his writerly skill and cunning imagination.


The story concerns the twins Lisa and Sam and their elder brother Ralph, orphaned after their parents die in a car crash. After passing their teenage years in a series of foster homes, they seek each other out and try to recreate the old family warmth and togetherness. Sam, the narrator, eventually perceives that this can only be achieved as an act of will. Each of the siblings has difficulty in feeling love for others. Personally, he can remember very little from his childhood and has to rely on Lisa, who acts as ‘the collective memory’. Finally he takes an isolated job on a geological survey and begins to suspect that the memories he has had implanted might be false. On his return he forces his brother and sister to admit the truth from which they had always been shielding him. He had in fact been with his parents in the car when it crashed.


Much of the book concerns Sam’s contacts with Ralph and Lisa, their acceptance of each other’s very different character, and his attempts at breaking out of this cocoon to establish relationships with others. Möring relates the psychological mechanics of this indirectly. Dysfunctional characters are mirrored by frequent descriptions of industrial wastelands, the sites abandoned by a consumerist society and peopled by misfits. Sam’s quest for normality takes a decisive turn at Kopakker, a place where an oil well had simply sunk underground. Earlier on he had been writing a report on the site as part of his job as an archivist, thus introducing a further set of ironies. ‘Archivist’ is a strange job for a man without a memory of the past. Sam is given it by an oil executive called Huizinga who claims to be completely at sea so far as his archives are concerned. This is a good Dutch joke, and a further double negative, for the best known Dutchman of that name was an internationally famed historian who did little else but comb archives! It is subtlety of this kind that explains the book’s success and makes the reading of it so intriguing. As with all of Sam’s memories, nothing is quite what it seems at first.

‘¼a subterranean world,’ said Ralph, ‘a genuine inferno, with flickering red light on the walls, TV screens all over the place with war videos¼’ Suddenly I heard Lisa’s voice, Lisa saying that one day Simon had ‘stopped feeling like a lover’, Lisa saying: ‘Without the mystery, love is a series of motions’. What had she meant? She had sat opposite me, one hand in her reddish brown hair, her bloodshot eyes focussed on a point in the distance, a burning cigarette in her other hand. ‘Without the mystery, love is a series of motions.’ What mystery? ‘They’ve gutted the place,’ said Ralph. ‘It looks like a hollowed out block of stone, with bare walls, steel stairs and catwalks everywhere you look. I’ve been there twice now and both times I thought: this is a goddamn science fiction movie.’ Hey, I said to an imaginary Fleming, you think love isn’t an act of will? You should talk to my sister. Love is an act of will. You stop loving. It doesn’t just happen to you. First you keep on loving someone, regardless. But when the ‘regardless’ lasts too long, you stop. Because you want to. ‘You completely forget where you are,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s so fucking crowded, you feel like a slab of meat packed into a great big crate with lots of other slabs of meat. One night at Circe’s and you’re black and blue all over. And that kabunk-kabunk-kabunk makes mincemeat out of your brains. But there’s something about it.’ Echo, I thought, and this feeling I have that the world is slowly going under, that too many lives are seeping away and we just sit back and let it happen, let people go under, and we think, too bad, better luck next time, but there isn’t any goddamn next time, if you’re not happy now you never will be...(p. 113-4, tr. Stacey Knecht)