Book Review
"Snowleg": Crossing personal and political divides

By Wingate Packard
Special to The Seattle Times

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People who grow up without essential personal knowledge of their parents are often impelled to set off on quests to discover what identity they share with their missing mothers or fathers. In the riveting and surprisingly unsentimental novel "Snowleg," Nicholas Shakespeare tells the story of Peter Hithersay, who learns as a teenager that his biological father was an East German political prisoner whom his British mother knew for less than a day.

Peter's life course is redirected immensely by this information, and for two decades of "self-exile," he suffers estrangement from his English family and alienation as a doctor in Germany. Shakespeare's novel shows the way Peter's life is channeled by information and choices and dammed up by the political reality of the Cold War and a divided Europe, represented by the Berlin Wall.

"Snowleg" by Nicholas Shakespeare Harcourt, 387 pp., $25

After he learns he is half-German, Peter decides to go to medical school in West Germany. While still a student, he visits Leipzig in East Germany in 1983 in search of his father, even though he doesn't know his surname. He tumbles into an intense affair with a young East German woman and even considers smuggling her out of the country at a time when state brutality marked any shenanigans at the border. At the last minute he abandons her, and he spends the next 20-odd years burning in remorse and wondering what became of her behind the Iron Curtain because of his betrayal.

The British teenager in the beginning of the book has posters of chivalric heroes on his walls. His gradual disillusionment, and his struggle to accept himself as part German, raised in a land where World War II German air raids are still fresh in memory, are convincingly played out. Peter becomes a gerontologist in Berlin, with a gift for talking with his elderly patients.

After the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, Peter is offered a way to find the woman he has never forgotten. He only knows her by a nickname her grandmother called her that he has anglicized to "Snowleg." A cranky and ancient East German woman is brought to the nursing home he supervises and offers him a clue to finding Snowleg. The tension builds as Peter closes in like a reluctant detective, waiting years for the information in the dossiers that the East German state compiled on his mother, himself and on Snowleg, digesting that information with heartburn at the thought of their personal concerns marking a place in repressive government records.

"Snowleg" is an admirably organic novel, well-seeded with richly idiosyncratic characterizations and finely evoked places (the dreary East German exteriors and interiors are wrenchingly pathetic). "Snowleg" is a delicious mystery, not only in genre but also in the ways that people separated by personal or public barriers carry on after life-altering schisms.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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