Cat and Mouse

Gunter Grass

This was one of the Rev's recommendations and there were certainly bits to it I liked although whether we liked the same bits is another question. Rev, your description "a twisted little game between two friends without one of them knowing the rules, VERY claustrophobic and disturbing novel." is not one I recognise unless you're referring to the last dozen pages. It probably doesn't help that I can only say those last few pages left me mystified. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's one of those novel where a seemingly minor incident described on page one sets the scene for rest of the book. Schoolboys lying around in the sun seize a cat and set it upon one of their number while he sleeps. The victim is Mahlke, the book's hero and something of an Owen Meany figure (perhaps Grass's novel is even the inspiration for John Irving's Owen - there are plenty of parallels). The prank is inspired by the victim's deformity, an enlarged and over-active Adam's apple and in the enlarged and over-active imaginations of the boys the cat springs upon Mahlke's busy throat as if it were a mouse.

As I said, the incident is a small one and the narrative soon moves on. Mahlke is at the centre of everything the boys do. He is the group's most daring diver and swimmer, it boldest thief, the most prodigious masterbator. And always, always the obsession with his throat, his "mouse".

The year is 1943-ish. The setting is the Baltic coast of Poland, at that time German territory. One of the best things about the book is its salty quality. For the schoolboys the sea is an obsession, whether they are diving on a sunken minesweeper or reciting the statistics, the armour, the tonnage and the displacement of Germany's principal warships.

Nevertheless I still found it slowgoing and strangely inaccessible. I won't be rushing to pick up the more famous Tin Drum.