If you have never read The Tin Drum I congratulate you, and hope that you might long remain in this state. Essentially, it tells the story of a thoroughly unpleasant child called Oscar, who is such a freak that he can remember his own birth. The book is basically his life story, written from a mental asylum when he is nearly thirty, which I can assure you is the best place for him. He is born in Danzig, as it was then called, some time before the Second World War, and has a startlingly clear recollection of his mother promising him a tin drum for his third birthday not long after he emerges from the womb. This gives him the motivation to live until his third birthday, whereupon he finally receives the cursed drum and proceeds to spend the rest of the novel banging on it in a noisily obsessive manner. When I say obsessive, I mean that the drum is the most important thing in his life, ranking well above any human beings, and he is prepared to let other people go to their deaths if it means he can retain it. Also on his third birthday, to prove what a freak he is Oscar decides not to grow anymore, and spends the rest of his miserable existance as a dwarf. This causes considerable embarrassment to his longsuffering relatives, to the point where his mother is reduced to killing herself by overdosing on fish. I am absolutely convinced that she only does this to escape from the incessant drumming of her evil midget son.

As time passes, Oscar becomes older if not taller and war breaks out. The lover of Oscar’s deceased mother and his own possible father is employed by the Polish post office in the city and is involved in trying to defend it from military attack. Oscar, who has tracked the poor man down in the hope that he can be persuaded to buy him a new drum, gets caught up in the battle and is locked in the besieged post office whilst the army attack it. The army of course soon wins against the handful of Polish postmen, and when they eventually storm the building and try to capture the inhabitants, Oscar incriminates the poor ex-lover and saves his own skin by sending him to certain execution. Nice.

People have told me that this book is a comment on the war, hence the fact that it has won a Nobel Prize. I’ve not read an interpretation of the book, so I have no idea what clever people think it means, but as far as I’m concerned this is a book which says nothing useful about the war at all. Oscar hardly notices the war, because Oscar is not interested in anything other than his own well-being and his drum. The only time the war gets a real mention at all is right at the end, when the Russians come to his house to capture the inhabitants. Oscar is in the cellar with his mother’s husband who is presumably his father if his mother’s lover wasn’t, and observing that he is in a highly nervous, hysterical state, hands him a badge with a Nazi insignia. The father knows that if he is found with a Nazi badge, the Russians will kill him, so he attempts to swallow it. It’s only small, but Oscar deliberately handed it to him with the pin off the latch so that he would choke and die a horribly painful death. Why Oscar would want to do this to a man who has been nothing but kindness to him for his entire life is beyond me. I fail to see that Oscar demonstrates the slightest little bit of remorse. In fact, he gets so full of his own selfimportance that he decides he’s Jesus. Hmmm.

Other than that the book rumbles on in a tedious manner, full of Oscar’s oh so terribly interesting thoughts about the most important subject in the world: Oscar. He moves to West Germany after the war, spends a while working as a nude model in an art college, then accidentally becomes a famous jazz musician. Since early childhood he’s had a bit of a fixation with nurses, trying to take any opportunity he can get to them into bed (horrible mental image considering he’s about two foot tall and a hunchback!) and he develops a dangerous obsession with a Nurse Dorothy who happens to lodge in the same house as him. Despite the fact he’s never even seen her because she works shifts, he decides he’s in love with her and breaks into her room one day so he can sit in her wardrobe and smell her clothes. Right. Some time later, he then jumps on her in the corridor in the middle of the night, tells her he’s Satan and trys unsuccessfully to
rape her. Hmmm. Indeed.

The book concludes with Oscar walking alone in a park with a borrowed dog. Don’t ask. The dog runs off and comes back with a human finger. It’s that sort of book. What happens next, for me illustrates the complete inhumanity of the protagonist. Most people, upon being handed a finger by a dog, would be shocked and horrified. Most people would wonder where the rest of the body was, try to get the dog to take them to it, and ultimately take the evidence to the police. That would be the normal reaction. Our dear hero, however, decides that the finger would be a nice souvenir. Coincidentally, it happens to belong to the very Nurse Dorothy whom he has essentially been stalking, and who now appears to have been murdered. Whether or not Oscar has committed the murder is ambiguous, but in any case he is convicted off it and put in the asylum. More or less the end.

So an utterly pointless book about a totally unlikeable character, whom I detested so much that I couldn’t even enjoy the prose when I felt I was supposed to. I wouldn’t, on principle, recommend anyone read a book which conjures up such mental images as a woman inserting a live eel in her vagina. I’m sure that the fact that I have failed to appreciate what is clearly a great work of art demonstrates the depths of my personal stupidity. Doubtless the fact that the reader hates Oscar is some sort of clever literary device which is supposed to help me understand some deep and meaningful point about the Nazis. Nevertheless, the only character in the book who I felt was halfways normal and with whom I had any sympathy at all was Oscar’s official father, he who was killed by swallowing the Nazi party badge. In other words, the only character who I managed to identify with rather than despise was the Nazi – certainly not what Grass intended. There is either something seriously wrong with the book, or something seriously wrong with me