Interview/ Paul Pickering, author
A journalist reporting from conflict zones for The Times London, Paul Pickering turned novelist to tell the story of Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, whom he met in Paraguay. Pickering is often likened to Graham Greene, as much for his fiction as for the life he has led. Lucy, his eighth novel, is being released later in July by Salt in the UK. In an exclusive interview with writer Bhaskar Roy, Pickering talks about Lucy and its uncanny insights into the Gaza genocide.
Q\ When the burning man runs up a mountain of rubble, giving Lucy a stunning opening, the American colonel watching the spectacle mistakes him for another Jew set aflame by the Nazis. You wrote the novel, set in post-war Berlin, well before the Gaza genocide triggered by the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023. Was it clairvoyance to construct the horrid scene, an ironic civilisational commentary on victim-turned-aggressor role reversal?
A\ The epigraph of the novel is, “No one has the right to obey”, by Hannah Arendt, a philosopher and journalist who covered the trials of those accused of killing at least six million Jews in the Holocaust, plus one million gypsies, not to mention homosexuals, Freemasons, communists and those that have fallen out with the regime. There is no understating this unique horror, or that Jews from all over Germany, France, Italy and the rest of Europe were the main target. Perhaps more people have died from famine or war under other regimes, but this killing was meticulously planned and industrial. Jewellery was melted down, hair was cut off to stuff mattresses with, skin was used for lampshades, children were used in experiments beyond horror. I still have a receipt for a section of a 12-year-old gypsy boy’s head I carried when looking for Josef Mengele, a journalistic assignment that led to my first novel.
The Nazi defence that they were “only obeying orders” was beyond absurd. The image of the burning man moves the traumatised American colonel, Kells, and seems to represent freedom and magnificence among the ruins. There are flower petals in the man’s hand and, as he is obviously going to die, Kells gives him the name of a Jewish resistance hero and expert in silk worms. But the man is not Jewish, and takes over the lives of three others, psychologically and sexually. They, in turn, are all guilty of crimes. No one is without guilt, but with the end of that spring battle in Berlin on May 2, where a quarter of a million soldiers and many more civilians died, an innocence returned.
The vicious killing of 40,000 people in Gaza and the pulverising of buildings and hospitals with American bombs are not on the same scale. Nor does it have the same organised purpose as the camps and the gas chambers. But one does not need to be psychic to realise that a nation state planted in Palestine by the British Empire will become increasingly toxic. To cause such suffering is unforgivable. Marx says the oppressed people take on the characteristics of the oppressor. One child dead, whatever race or creed, is one too many after the lessons of Nazi Germany. And one should not just blame politicians like [US President Joe] Biden or [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu, who face political oblivion or prison, or both. Everyone should speak out, shout out, about Gaza. No one has the right to obey.
Q\ In a sense, Lucy is about the aftermath of the war with the Hitlerite evil fogging the road ahead. The kibbutz, where lively, lithe young Jews enter a bubble, unmindful of the villainy lurking around, seems to be Israel in miniature―a place that combines an idyll and vengeful dark designs. Has your novel gained a startlingly new yet unintended meaning as Israeli missiles, often supplied by the US, are flattening homes and killing children in Gaza?
A\ There is certainly a tension between those at the Aviv kibbutz in Lucy who favour the kibbutz ideal―like the kind, rum-drinking rabbi, who has been in the resistance in Germany throughout the war, but never mentions the fact―and those who see no end to the centuries of killings and pogroms except a state of their own, defended against all comers.
This is not a bubble. From the start, there is conflict as the “burning man” character, Hyman, slowly takes control. But there is also the diamond of the kibbutz system. The rabbi is not a Zionist, he does not want a state of Israel. Indeed, he says one has been forbidden to Jews by God after the destruction of the Temple. He believes in a spiritual Israel. “There are non-Jewish people here, and that does not matter,” he says. “What matters to me is that we are all free. We are free to organise this kibbutz, this seed of a community, whose prime aim is not defence, or even return to Israel. My Israel is a spiritual place that gives me strength. We have a greater task than mere return, my little oysters. Our task is quite simply tikkun olam, to repair the world. We have to establish a community that will not only give succour to our people, but that will mend the world. We must mend the world. We must tie it together again.”
The right in Israel detest the mostly left-wing kibbutz settlements that Hamas attacked on October 7, and it is the nationalists who take over the kibbutz in my novel. Personally, I think the communal principles of the kibbutz can be vital in restoring peace in war-torn states. Arendt writes about this vinculum, or binding in, as does St Augustine. The dramatic conclusion of the novel is very much about whether there is any limit to who and what crimes can be bound back into society.
Q\ Your first novel, Wild About Harry, was born out of your journalistic search for Mengele, the Auschwitz demon. The gigantic African tusker in Elephant, your previous novel, serves as a metaphor for lost innocence and uncorrupted simplicity out of sync with the capitalist world, and Lucy reads like a meditation on civilisational flaws threatening the basic human values.
A\ It is a delicious human paradox that the more we try to control things―be it a love affair or a country―is when things fall apart. It works the other way, too. When asked who he is, the devil in Faust replies: “That Power I serve/ Which wills forever evil/ Yet does forever good.” The fact that we humans can break anything, any tyranny, is one of the most beautiful things in creation.