Brenner and God

Brenner and God is the first of Wolf Haas’s Detective Simon Brenner series to be translated from German to English, though it is the seventh book in the series. It seems like an odd place to begin, but I doubt any one would guess.
It was the premise that piqued my interest, introducing Brenner, once a police detective, now a personal chauffeur for a two year old girl, Helena. When Helena goes missing from the limousine while Brenner sips espresso in the service station, it is assumed that she has been kidnapped. The police suspect Brenner is involved, but her parents, a doctor who provides abortions and a construction and property developer giant, have plenty of enemies. When there is no ransom demand, or a body, Brenner decides to show more investigate the child’s disappearance only to find himself mired in a cesspit of lies, betrayal and murder.

Told in the first person by an omniscient narrator who is never introduced, intermittently addresses the reader directly as well as interjecting opinion, information and judgement, Brenner and God has one of the most unusual styles of narration I have encountered. The effect is initially bewildering and I am not sure I ever quite got used to the quirky voice, even though I admired the author’s unique approach.

Brenner is a cynic with an emerging pill habit and a history of ignoring authority. Despite being warned off becoming involved in the investigation he refuses to step back from the case, driven not only by his sense of guilt but also his belief in doing the right thing. Under suspicion is an anti abortionist campaigner and a cabal of business heavyweights, but even as bodies begin to fall, Brenner doesn’t get any closer to finding Helena and finds himself, literally in the sh*t.

I did enjoy Brenner and God, it’s entertaining and clever with an appealing protagonist. This is a book for fans of noir detective fiction looking for something unusual and edgy. show less

BRENNER AND GOD is a dark, deftly plotted tale of a detective turned chauffeur who loses his 2-year old passenger, the daughter of a powerful construction magnate and his abortion doctor wife. But there is a lot more to it than that. In fact, the plot complications would not be unworthy of a 21st Century Raymond Chandler. Essential to the storytelling is a highly intrusive narrative voice--the author's I assume, unless Brenner is accustomed to thinking of himself in the third person all the time. The voice is by turns enlightening, philosophical, amusing, and annoying, with (I'm afraid) annoying being the most common. This over-the-top narrative style seriously mars a very good story that could have been more effectively told with a bit show more more authorial restraint. Still, I'd be interested in some of Brenner's previous cases if they are available in English. To the author's credit, at least he kept the book at a reasonable length. show less

This is a very clever murder mystery, written from an unusual and witty authorial viewpoint. The semi-omniscient narrator never identifies or explains himself, yet seems to know some things, and not know other things, and becomes a character in himself. He informs us early in the book that specific terrible things will happen, and when, and they do. This in no way detracts from the pleasures of walking through the poses and plans of the evil Senator, the rich developer and the scheming thugs. The setting is Vienna. The context is city politics, an abortion clinic, and a former police detective who has fallen in life to the status of a mere chauffeur to a rich family's four year old child. When bad things happen to his young charge he show more takes it upon himself to descend into the muck, figuratively and literally, and sort it all out. The plot is not unusual, although suitably gruesome and nauseating, but the contemporary Austrian cultural context and the narrative voice make this very much worth a read. show less

Translated from the German by Annie Janusch

“Personally, I prefer to look on the positive side of life these days. Not just Murder He Wrote all the time, and who-got-who with a bullet, a knife, an extension cord, or what else I don’t know. Me, I’m far more interested in the nice people now, the quiet ones, the normals, the ones who you’d say—they lead their regular lives, abide by the law, don’t mistake themselves for the good lord when they get up in the morning, just nice tidy lives.

Look at Kressdor’s chauffeur, for example.”

That chauffeur is Brenner, or Herr Simon, a former police officer now assigned to be the personal driver of a two-year-old little girl whose wealthy and high-profile parents need to make sure show more she’s safe from being kidnapped. It seems a lowly task, except that right off, Brenner admits that his most interesting converations in life so far have been with Helena, the babbling child, and he’s paid well for what he finds comforting and solid work. His biggest challenge appears to be how to sneak Helena a chocolate bar without her parents finding out. But, it’s this very chocolate bar that gets him in trouble, because in purchasing it, he lowers his guard, just the once, and she is taken.

Brenner is a brooder, and his instinct is to tear himself apart with guilt, and go back to figuring out how to find her. Now, there’s no shortage of brooding, ex-cops turning into vengeful detectives in modern fiction, but Brenner is compelling because he’s brought to light by the omniscient narrator of the novel, who lets us in on Brenner’s inner struggles. He’s suffered recent depression, gets really excited about clean sheets, seems an linguistic expert in dialects, adores Jimi Hendrix, and can’t keep his eye off the clock…counting the moments since she’s gone missing and hoping against the worst. And we learn why he loves to drive:

“…Because that’s one of the many advantages of a car. You can listen to music in private, you can enjoy nature without exertion, and when in despair, you can let out a cry.”

As the reader learns about Brenner, and watches him search, they soon begin to wonder about the narrator as well. Because this isn’t some neutral observer: this narrator is an in-your-face and aggressive voice who tells the reader to “listen up” and “pay attention”. He’s clearly on Brenner’s side even when the kidnapping plot gets messy:

“Between the seventy-fourth and the eighty-eighth hours, Brenner did some first-rate investigative work that was never fully appreciated afterward….a detective can’t be praised for everything he did right. But because everyone glossed right over it, I’d like to at least touch on it briefly. I have to say it was brilliant... […] He achieved peak detective form there, and there’s only one thing to be said: hats off.”

For those who enjoy detective novels, this is no procedural. Much of the actual work of solving the crime is left out in favor of developing the plot: mainly, what is going on with Helena’s parents, an abortion doctor and a mega-developer, that may be related to her disappearance. Brenner’s musings on both of their occupations gets far more time than chasing down forensic evidence, which keeps this from feeling like so many popular crime novels that appear to be repeats of CSI episodes, where the story is lost in the jargon.

My only minor qualm about the story was the curious introduction of one character, a police officer named Peinhaupt. He’s all set up to be a prime character, and drawn with incredible detail. I was surprised to see that his character sort of vanishes in the action of the mystery, only to reappear later in a minor scene. While this is part of a series of books about Brenner, the seventh in fact, it is the first Brenner novel to appear in English. I’m curious if Peinhaupt might have had a role in earlier Brenner novels that might explain his appearance here, or if he may be in line for a series of his own.

Time, in minutes, hours, and days, plays a huge factor in the plot…the narrator and Brenner both dwell on every hour that goes by (pay attention, you’re reminded). And while Brenner searches and the narrator speculates, these time stamps are the real events that make up this fast-paced story:

“Then the worst thing that can happen to a detective happened to Brenner. Fifty-seven hours after the girl’s disappearance, he became innocent.” show less

What fun, what style, made me laugh out loud.
And I liked how the narrator takes the reader by the hand (leading/misleading). Will try to read the series from the beginning in German since the translation indicates a few Austrian jokes/insights worth savouring.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I'm never a good person to listen to when it comes to crime novels, because I'm not really much of a fan of the genre; and then when it comes to Wolf Haas' Brenner and God, the English debut of what is apparently a hugely popular series in Europe, there's an additional problem, which is that the translation by Annie Janusch sounds very, very strange, and I couldn't tell whether this was being done on purpose or not. I mean, the story is serviceable enough, the tale of a stressed-out former detective who takes a job as a chauffeur for the rich and show more famous, and who gets reluctantly pulled back into crime-fighting when a little girl he was in charge of gets kidnapped right under his nose; but I'm not sure if it's that Haas' original version was written in some hyper-stylized, Denis-Johnson-style German version of noir prose, but the English version calls undue attention to its own sentence structure in nearly every paragraph, and not in the good way either, coming across at many times as if you were at DisneyWorld and listening to a foreign visitor comically attempt to ask directions to Space Mountain. When added to my natural disinterest in crime novels to begin with, the whole thing feels like I can't really do much service to this novel as a critic, so I'm just giving it a middle-of-the-road score today and moving on.

Out of 10: 7.5 show less

Mein erster Brenner.
Also den Schreibstil fand ich schon sehr gewöhnungsbedürftig, ich habe mich reingelesen und auch einige schöne Stellen gefunden. Die Geschichte ist ganz nett, also nett nett :-)Ehemaliger Polizist als Chauffeur, der Mädchen verliert und als Kettenreaktion fallen Beteiligte und Unbeteiligte tot um. Aber etwas nervig fand ich es schon.