Swiss cheese and Holocaust

Jennifer Wallace disentangles an epic about 20th-century horrors.

In his essay "The uncanny", Sigmund Freud recounts the story of getting lost in an old Italian town. As he wanders through the labyrinthine streets, looking for the public piazza he had left earlier, he keeps ending up in the same street in the town's red-light district. Compelled helplessly to repeat his journey, he is filled with a sense of the uncanny, of "something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of 'chance'". Enigmatically, Freud leaves the story without comment or analysis.

But when Tom Paulin retells Freud's story, in one of the opening poems of The Invasion Handbook , its significance is carefully explained. This is a story partly about sexual repression, about Freud's desire to return to the street of prostitutes. But it is also a story about political repression, about what it is permitted and not permitted to write.

my detour
was in fact to the piazza
where I abandoned
my voyages of discovery
in your language I quite well know
what it is the verbs to cover and to paint
mean
because in the end I wish to be read
as you read Shakespeare.

Freud and Paulin write as outsiders, as a Jew and an Irishman respectively, and must adopt "your language" in order to fit in. Writing the language of the establishment, Paulin implies, involves the suppression of truth, covering and painting over what really happened. The uncanny is actually shaped by powerful political lobbies and nothing happens by chance or can be left to uncertainty.

The image of the uncanny that emerges in Paulin's over-reading of Freud resonates throughout The Invasion Handbook . While the book's ostensible subject is the second world war, and while it tracks events from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the battle of Britain in 1940, it ranges far wider, to Napoleon, for example, and to the civil war that tore apart the Roman republic (through various references to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra ). Europe is haunted by its history, which is compelled, tragically, to repeat itself. War, it appears, is a "fateful and inescapable" event. So the seeds of the second world war were sown even during the first, as the skeleton, in a poem that partly pastiches Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est", uncannily warns "more to come - tell the ranks - more great more dulce days!". And the origins of the recent conflict in the Balkans can be traced back to the second world war, to the Nazi alliance between Germany and Croatia, repeated when Germany was the first country to recognise the independence of Croatia in 1991.

The history that Paulin tells, with its uncanny repetitions, like this German-Croatian story, is one that he claims has been repressed. He is keen to uncover, for example, the continuing legacy of Nazism. A bar of soap, manufactured from human fat in the hell of Auschwitz, surfaces at various points in the central poem of the collection, on the 1925 conference of Locarno. Impregnated with perfume when first made and then discovered for sale in a store in Italy in 1968, the soap becomes a symbol of Europe's failure to confront its shameful past and its tendency rather "to cover and to paint" over horror. Similarly, Switzerland, the democratic republic at the heart of Europe, becomes, in this collection of poems, the repository of sinister deceit. It is there that the gold, seized by the Nazis from the Jews, is still deposited in bank vaults: "complacent silent secretive / the look of buildings / that are hiding something". And that deceit was prefigured in the Geneva of Joseph Conrad's novel Under Western Eyes , a place of "spies and gendarmes".

Since, according to Paulin, it is the tendency of European powers to hush up atavistic hatreds and motivations for events, it is the task of the socially conscious writer to expose them. Through quotation, pastiche and allusion, he engages with various early 20th-century writers, testing each one for his degree of complicity in this secret of silence. Joyce, for example, who, like Paulin, lived in exile and therefore had the capacity to penetrate the deceptions of the establishment, is shown ultimately to have abrogated responsibility. Although he took a Jew as the main protagonist for his novel Ulysses , he ended up more interested in the personal than the political, "angry but irenic". In contrast, Conrad reconciled the "battlefield and fountain", or the ethics and aesthetics of writing, most effectively. At the heart of Under Western Eyes , Paulin suggests, is "the something else - not a thing - / that we call conscience", and it is this that cuts through the culture of spies and deception.

Since the presiding trope for Paulin's collection seems to be the uncanny, it is perhaps not surprising that at times these poems smack almost of the paranoiac. There is a passing reference in "Locarno One", for example, to Olaf Palme, the Swedish prime minister shot in mysterious circumstances and the subject since of various conspiracy theories. And the suggestion, in "Shirking the Camps", that eating Swiss cheese indirectly makes one complicit in the Nazi Holocaust:

the Jews the queers the gypsies
pushed like forests of brushwood into the furnace?...
that chunk of Appenzeller
it tastes smoky on your tongue

Since dates and events apparently are designed to repeat themselves ("Chaos Theory"), Paulin can draw connections and analogies that are sometimes more the product of anxiety or anger than history.

It is ironic, moreover, that given the fact that this collection is intended to re-awaken our sense of history, so few of the events mentioned in these poems are footnoted. Numerous names and facts that are now obscure to all but the few who are expert in 20th-century European history crop up in these poems and, besides the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Conference, carry no explanation. It is not clear, therefore, for what readership this book is intended. While the ethical urgency of the book suggests it demands a wide popular readership, the elusive obscurity of most of the references make it largely more accessible to academics.

But despite the paranoia and the compensatory, defensive intellectual elitism, The Invasion Handbook represents an important intervention in our understanding of European history and its continuing repercussions. I await the next volume with anticipation.

Jennifer Wallace is a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.