Like recent Black Death novels by James Meek and Oisín Fagan, Kehlmann’s portrait of bygone dark times both indulges and disrupts the apocalyptic turn in present-day commentary on current affairs. When Tyll leaves his village with a vagabond balladeer to become a travelling player, he’s relegated to the novel’s margins, as the focus falls on a series of real-life historical figures, including Elizabeth Stuart, granddaughter of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her ill-fated husband, Frederick, King of Bohemia. Yet just as we settle down for a character-centred picaresque, the novel shifts into an episodic hopscotch through the royal politicking behind the continent-wide bloodshed. Far from it: when he’s eventually discovered in the forest, he’s coated in flour, wearing the donkey’s scalp it’s a grotesque portent of his future as an agent of chaos who, refusing the cards he’s dealt, tosses them in the air.
Terrified, deep in a forest with their donkey, he worries she’ll find out that he’s wet himself.Īlthough he’s brought to life with plausibly universal detail, the point isn’t that Tyll could be any boy. When she goes into labour as they are taking flour to the next village, the boy is ordered to wait alone while she turns back. “When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person?” he wonders, eyeing his pregnant mother, Agneta. Kehlmann puts us deftly inside Tyll’s fretful mind. We’re shown his tough village boyhood as the son of an intellectually curious miller whose interest in infinity – “the fact that to every number you can add another, as if there were no God to stem such a tide” – spells doom when witch-hunting Jesuits turn up from England in the wake of the gunpowder plot. Kehlmann establishes Tyll as a flesh-and-blood figure by giving him tragic origins. Wikipedia wormholes await the reader unfamiliar with, say, the battle of Zusmarshausen, the poet Martin Opitz, or indeed the novel’s eponymous hero, lifted from a 16th-century folk tale about a lawless practical joker who roams the land exposing hypocrisy (Michael Rosen once adapted the story).
Set in early 17th-century Europe, it takes place during the thirty years’ war, a sectarian power struggle over the Holy Roman Empire, which ravaged Germany and left millions dead. ) The creative travails of men, and the collateral damage they inflict, may not seem a surefire draw for book-buyers, yet Kehlmann, who writes in German, is translated into more than 40 languages – he’s fun to read, and his books travel light, uncluttered by cultural references. (His last book broke with the formula to follow a harassed screenwriter on holiday with his family it’s called You Should Have Left. Ime and again, Daniel Kehlmann’s novels feature an artist whose success depends on leaving his wife and children.
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