A stunning novelization that explores the themes of guilt and innocence using a single devastating incident in the life of a Dutch child who survives the Nazi occupation of Holland. He reaches adulthood not fully understanding all that went wrong, the domino effect of one act of violence which cost him his family and the life they shared. Through a series of encounters with those in his past we learn the complex truth about this one moment in time. It reminds one that it is all too easy to assign blame without knowing all the facts. Once all the layers of the onion are peeled away every act of courage revealed, as well as the unintended consequences of making honorable choices. ( )

Sublime fiction writing which manages to transmit philosophical questions of power, evil, retribution and loss through powerful and haunting prose. A first class read which will resonate with me for a long time. ( )

often bleak, but mesmerising
"Never again could things be set right. Life on this planet was a failure, abig flop; better that it should never have befun. Not until it ended, and with it every single memory of all those death throes, would the world return to order.
"But what does it matter? Everything is forgotten in the end."
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"But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute........
Whenever he thought about time,...... he did not conceive of events as coming out of the future to move through the present into the past . Instead, they developed out of the past in the present on their way to an unknown future." ( )

In January 1945, a few months before the end of the war, a Dutch Nazi police officer is assassinated by the Resistance as he cycles home from work. The attack sets of a chain of tragic events in which young Anton Steenwijk and his family are caught up.

Mulisch looks at the repercussions of the attack through a series of "episodes" from the next 36 years of Anton's life. He explores how extreme situations challenge our ideas of guilt and responsibility, and how we make ethical choices under pressure. When can we accept the responsibility of causing harm to someone if we know it will prevent a worse harm elsewhere?

Mulisch also has his fun with the irony that Anton, notionally the innocent victim, in practice suffers far less from the effects of the incident than any of the other people involved, who all for different reasons have feelings of guilt towards him.

Anton is a bit of an uncomfortable protagonist -- he has something of Camus's Meursault about him, and it surely isn't accidental that Mulisch makes him an anaesthetist, a man who earns his living by suppressing other people's pain. ( )

The Assault by Harry Mulisch is one of the best novels I have read, in fact it is possibly one of the finest examples of European postwar fiction. Mulisch focuses on the persistence of memory in his protagonist, Anton Steenwijk. It is his memory of the massacre of his family near the end of World War II that permeates and shapes the rest of his life in ways that he has difficulty comprehending. Mulisch, using a taut and subtle style, explores questions of guilt and innocence, heroism and cowardice in this spellbinding and moving novel. ( )