In this novel about an aging has-been called Uli Bouwmeester, Harry Mulisch plays a dizzying game with reality and artifice. Which is more unreal: Uli at home behind dikes in the polder with his grotesque sister Berta and their poodle Joost, his encounter with a transsexual as he wanders in a daze through Amsterdam at night, or his recall to the theatre to play a fictitious actor from the turn of the twentieth century playing Prospero? That may be improbable, but also ‘real’ as it is part of the make-believe world of the novel. But in the final two chapters, Uli is so overtaken by the role he is playing that he becomes — he is — Pierre de Vries. The twentieth century falls away, and the reader is plunged into the Amsterdam theatre world of 1904. Fiction for Uli has become reality. The puzzle for the reader is: what is happening to Uli? Is it all too much for the eighty-year-old brought out of retirement? Is this his very last call?


Running through the novel which was first published in 1985, is the theme of collaboration and responsibility for acts committed during the Second World War. This is a major theme in Mulisch’s work, most notably in The Assault. Uli travelled round Germany with a group of entertainers performing for the German troops, was interned after the war as a possible collaborator but soon released. Although his career prospects were damaged, he scraped a living as a seedy night-club manager and thought he had put the past safely behind him until he is reminded of his wartime activities by a Jewish interviewer from a TV arts programme.


Uli represents that large group who never took a moral stance — they just went about their business as usual. The complete absence of guilt and lack of awareness of any responsibility is emphasized by the fact that the only deep guilt which comes to the surface as Uli begins to fall apart under the strain is sexual guilt over an encounter with a German soldier during an air-raid.

Whilst on the other side of the curtain the ovation continued unabated, people came running on stage from all directions, in white overalls, pullovers, Shakespearian costumes, Victorian dress. Cautious hands were put on Uli’s back, lifted him up, gently turned him over. Everyone thought (feared? hoped?) the same: that maybe they were both dead; but then still too shocked to move, Etienne spoke:

‘I thought he was really going to murder me.’

The stage manager, who had put his ear to Uli’s chest, raise his head. ‘He’s alive.’

‘Shouldn’t we call a doctor?’ asked Paul.

‘What’s the matter this time!’ Berta called from afar. She clambered up on the set and knelt by Uli’s side with her hands flat against his cheeks she shook his head, as if he were a clock that had stopped. ‘Uli!’ she commanded loudly.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. His gaze roved past the standing figures around him and then returned to her.

‘I want to go home,’ he said softly. (p. 259, tr. Adrienne Dixon)