The Sixth Lamentation

The process of aging, inching towards death, shrinks a life, distilling it down to its most basic. The mind returns, effortlessly but urgently, to the defining moments of one’s life. And so, Agnes, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, returns to the days of her youth, picking through them, reevaluating them, and recording them in two school notebooks, purchased on the way home from the doctor’s office and her final death sentence. Slowly dieing of a degenerative neurological disorder and daily losing control of her body, Agnes archives her past on the thin notebook paper, hoping to explain herself to her family before it’s too late. As she begins to write, a former Nazi SS officer appears at a local priory, claiming the ancient show more right of sanctuary. The two enigmatic people, a cool, aloof grandmother and a suspected war criminal, are inexorably tied together by a mysterious past, one which threatens to redefine not only their lives but the lives of everyone they have touched.

The 6th Lamentation, a brilliant patchwork mystery, examines the nature of human perception. Every event, every spoken word captured on the page reshapes itself in the eyes and understanding of each different character. All of the people trying to flesh out the events of their past touch a different piece of the elephant, remembering and describing their lives in drastically different ways. And their misunderstandings lead them to fatal errors in judgment about each other and about the true nature of what transpired amongst them.

William Brodrick populated the novel with wildly fascinating, natural characters, filled with the common contradictions of human living. Among these characters, Anselm, a barrister turned monk, stands out. His faith is tenuous and alive, subject to the whims of everyday life but able to sustain him, even when he is unaware of its power over him.

As the mystery of the novel progresses, Brodrick attacks it from every angle, leading the reader to the same misjudgments that befall the characters in the book. The result is a captivating and dynamic story, woven in layers which catch the eye differently depending on the angle of view. On rare occasions, Brodrick confuses the narrative slightly with the complexity of his style, but drags the reader back to the story’s thread with a quick summary from one of the players. Ultimately, Brodrick’s intricate mystery overpowers neither the story nor his message. Rather, it serves to carry the story along, exhibiting ever more complex and disparate views of the past. Thus, the story’s conclusion is all the more sobering, with some characters finally reconciling themselves to the truth of their past and others trapped forever in faulty judgments, pursuing them to fatal ends. Brodrick reminds us that, as life necessarily winds down, reducing us, reconciliation depends upon constant and honest self evaluation.

4 ½ bones!!!! show less

The Sixth Lamentation has an excellent plot (surely dramatisation is a possibility?) and it is this which makes it such an interesting read and ensures that anyone wants to get to the end. Unfortunately getting there sometimes means gritting your teeth at other weaknesses.

The plot focuses upon a dilemma: a man is accused of being a Nazi war criminal - it is alleged he oversaw the destruction of a resistance operation ("the round table") to smuggle Jewish children out of occupied France; he seeks refuge in a monestry and many characters become entailed in the main questions of his guilt and who betrayed the round table.

The main problem is that all the characters appear to be inhabited by an amateur dramatist. So extreme is their reaction show more to almost any dramatic footnote that you begin to wonder about their mental stability, let alone how they can get through the day without those endless stabs of remorse / anger / shame / regret turning them into emotional wrecks. One or two of the characters are so melodramatic that they deserve a cape and opening lines of "it is I, Salomon Lachaise".

It has been picked up in some of the other reviews that the prose style is a little clumsy - this is true (some of the paragraphs need careful re-reading), although it rarely gets in the way.

The Sixth Lamentation is a fascinating story with many twists and revelations. However, it suffers from an over-active author who contorts his characters and language into shapes and gives us far too neat an ending. Give it a read, but for the plot, not for the style. show less

Father Anselm was once a barrister but decided that the secular life was not for him and joined a monastery. One day a stranger appears at the monastery and asks for sanctuary, he is an accused Nazi war criminal. During the war a group of young people arranged to smuggle Jewish children to safety from occupied Paris until they were betrayed. Most were killed but Agnes Aubret survived the death camps to marry and settle in England. Now a younger generation is looking for answers and vengeance.

I came to Brodrick's books late and actually started further on in the series so this is a regression to the start. Whilst Father Anselm is a thread that runs through, this isn't a book about him really. The story is rooted in actuality but the show more characters and scenarios are fictional. The writing is spare but utterly gripping and the characters are allowed to develop but still leave questions at the end. show less

Book 238. William Brodrick. The Sixth Lamentation. Loaned to me by John Baldwin Lesley Baldwin . "The 6th Lamentation refers to the Holocaust. The trigger of this complex story is the denunciation of an ex-SS whose wartime duties included supervising the deportation of Jews from France to the death camps and breaking up the Round Table, an underground railway. Having been helped to flee to England with his accomplice, a French police officer named Brionne, Schwermann seeks sanctuary in a priory, involving the Church in the proceedings. The story is structured along two poles: Father Anselm, witness for the present, mandated by Rome to locate Brionne; and Agnes, witness for the past, and her written account of the 1940s."
I struggled with show more this one. I had read about a third and maybe a lack of concentration and a complex plot meant I got my characters mixed up. The same character was referred to by both their christian & surname so I had 2 characters in my head! (I did that with War & Peace....). So I started again. The book weaves together fact and fiction. 7/10 show less

A truly excellent book that was only marred because I didn't read it continously. The pieces were very finely woven but I was catching all of the connections until they finally were spelled out for me and I never caught the very last few ones. Worth a re-read all in one sitting sometime.

This is a first novel? Hard to believe. I started this book at 10 pm and finished it at 1 am. I couldn't bring myself to stop reading - it was that good. Not only as a mystery, but as a novel in general. The ending is a little too formulaic, but a surprise which I must say I never saw coming. The ending is the reason the book gets a 9...I was a little let down at the way things sort of just a little too neatly fit. Other than that, it is a fine,no, an excellent novel. I highly recommend it.

Synopsis:
Set in England, present day, the story opens with Agnes Embleton, an elderly mother & grandmother, who has just received news that she's dying of motor neurone disease. She will, at some point the doctors tell her, lose all of her motor show more skills including the ability to talk. So before the disease develops into the final stages, Agnes feels this great need to share her past life with her granddaughter Lucy. She writes her story in a series of notebooks that she wants Lucy to read before Agnes dies. She reveals a life Lucy never even dreamed of.

That is plotline #1. Plotline #2:
Eduard Schwermann is a former SS officer who was stationed in France at the time of WWII. He has come to Larkwood Priory in England, and in speaking to one of the friars there, Father Anselm, he asks him what options are open to someone when it seems the entire world has turned against him. Anselm answers that in olden times, a man would claim Sanctuary. So Schwermann does just that. He claims sanctuary at Larkwood Priory, and somehow the media gets wind of the story. The Church realizes they have a dilemma here, so the head honchos send for Anselm, who in his pre-priestly life had been an attorney. They send him on a mission. As he gets more entangled in the lives of those affected by Schwermann, he finds he has a number of questions that cannot be easily answered. For example, why, toward the end of the war, did the church offer Schwermann, a former SS officer, sanctuary? Why did the British government allow Schwermann to get away and even furnish him with a new name? These two stories cross paths throughout the book. The mystery deepens as both Lucy and Anselm try to find the truth of what happened in the past -- but like one character in the novel warns, things are not what they seem.

The author does a great job not only in his characterizations...you never feel sorry for the bad guys here and you get drawn into the lives of most of the people in the novel. He deals with the Holocaust and its effects on his characters with compassion for the victims and disgust for its architects & those who carried out their orders. He also touches upon the role of politics, past & present, in the Catholic Church.

As I said, my only objection to this novel was that the end was a little too pat. Very contrived. The way the book reads, though, is perfect. It starts out slow, builds in tempo as you go along, then you find yourself unable to stop reading as the action builds. Had the ending moved along in this rhythm, it would have been a perfect novel.

Highly highly recommended. show less

In the main, William Brodrick's novel is haunting and believable, with ordinary characters facing incredible situations and revelations (based, in part, on the experiences of Brodrick's mother). The conclusion, however satisfying, somewhat stretches the reader's suspension of disbelief - too many twists and turns, with the relationships between characters changing in every chapter, and fantastic coincidences - but the overall story is historically informative with a natural progression. The dialogue is in turn funny and heartbreaking, and it's easy to sympathise with both the survivors and their betrayers. Thoughtful, poetic writing.