After her widely appreciated last two novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, and the fantastic, autobiographical The Cost of Living (a title which would also have fit this novel), Deborah Levy is definitely in a purple patch. The Man Who Saw Everything shifts between Abbey Road and East Berlin, 1988, 2016 and times between, with identities, sexualities and time periods dissolving and reforming as you read. There's a fluidity which is familiar from the previous novels, but Levy adds a sociopolitical thrust without losing her lightness of touch. The end of the Beatles/the optimism of the 1960s is contrasted with the optimism of the end of the GDR/cold war, which is then set against the negativities of Brexit (the one direct reference to which is rather jarring), rather like the old school, British communism of the Saul's (the narrator's) father opposes the realities of the dying GDR. There's a bit of the TV Life on Mars here and a strong comic streak as Saul attempts to recover from his Abbey Road accidents ("I think I had less sex in social democracies than I did in authoritarian regimes"). None of the characters are particularly likeable, except the conflicted Walter Muller perhaps, but that's the point. I grew a bit tired of Saul's references to his cheekbones, for example, but they captured his self-obsession at least as well as his girlfriend, Jennifer's photographs.

Who is the 'man' of the title? Saul is the obvious candidate but his observational skills seem partial at best and it is telling that he claims at one point that Walter "saw everything there was to see in me". As Jennifer tells him, "It's like this, Saul Adler, the main subject is not always you". This underlines the fact that the novel plays with the notions of subjects, identities and everythings. This makes it a great novel, a state of the nation novel that undermines the notions of nations, states and their histories, and should be widely read. I am grateful for the opportunity to have had an advance copy.

"‘Hello, Saul. How’s it going?’‘I’m trying to cross the road,’ I replied. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’ve been trying to cross the road for thirty years but stuff happened on the way.’"

The Beatles album Abbey Road (the recording sessions for which were the last in which all four participated) famously has on its cover no words but just a photograph, taken in August 1969, of the fab four crossing a zebra-crossing outside the EMI Studios in the road of that name.

I say 'all four' but of course the iconic photograph actually contained various clues confirming rumours that Paul McCartney had, in reality, died in a car accident in November 1966 and had been replaced by a look alike William Shears Campbell: the funeral procession like setting, with Lennon dressed as an angel, Starr and undertaker and Harrison the gravedigger, the corpse, McCartney out of step with the other and barefooted, his cigarette held in his wrong hand, the numberplate of the strategically placed Beetle 28IF (Paul would have been 28 if he was still alive *) and the mysterious lady with the blue dress on the reserve cover, among others.

(* objections that he would actually have been 27 not 28 rather miss the symbolic way age is calculated in eastern mystical cultures)

Further proof of McCartney's death, if any was needed, was that while John Lennon was to produce arguably his finest work after the break-up of the Beatles, the supposed McCartney went on to front the band Wings and to compose The Frog Song.

The photograph is perhaps the most imitated in pop culture, and Deborah Levy's new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything opens with her narrator Saul Adler (not Paul given he is from a Jewish family), a young historian specialising in Eastern Europe, attempting to do the same in 1988, the photo to be taken by his art photographer girlfriend Jennifer Moreau. Adler is about to embark on a trip to the GDR (the fall of the Berlin Wall one year later unforeseen) and the photo is a gift to the sister of his state-appointed interpreter, a Beatles fan, although she is rather keener that he brings a tin of hard-to-obtain pineapple chunks.

While traversing the zebra-crossing he is struck a glancing blow by a car, causing him minor injuries. But various clues alert us that all is not as it seems:

- the driver queries his age - see * above:

"When I told him I was twenty-eight, he didn’t believe me and asked for my age again."

- when he later returns to the scene, the mysterious woman with a blue dress appears

"While I was thinking about this, a woman came up to me waving an unlit cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a blue dress and asked if I had a light."

- and when the photo is taken - Saul who had been trying to play the Lennon part has mysteriously ended up shoeless and actually fulfilling the Paul/William role:

"There I was, walking barefoot on the zebra crossing in my white suit with the flared trousers, my hands in the pockets of the white jacket. There was a note from Jennifer: By the way, it’s not John Lennon who walked barefoot. That was Paul. JL wore white shoes. Managed to get you in mid-stride like the original, thanks to my trusty stepladder."

Levy's story is more than a retelling of the Paul is Dead conspiracy,

Is Saul dead? Or is he reliving his mother's death in a car-crash? And is it actually 1988 at all - Saul seems the one person who actually knows the Berlin Wall is due to fall - or is it 2016-7 and the aftermath of another key moment in European history, Brexit? The novel poses many questions and provides few answers as Saul's tale unravels rather confusingly, at times almost surreally, into shifting settings and times, and characters that morph into one another, but Levy's focus seems to be surveillance, gender fluidity, betrayal and envy, cyclical time and political dislocation.

A novel I hope to revisit later in the year when it is published.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

To start with a disclaimer. I think most readers would agree that there are some authors who write in a way that somehow, maybe not easily explained, ticks all the boxes for them. Deborah Levy is such a writer for me. When I read what Levy writes, I can almost feel my brain being re-wired to open up new possibilities.

Interviewed in April 2018 by The Guardian, Deborah Levy ended by saying

I’m halfway through my next novel and it is all about masculinity. It’s about an amazing man and it’s called The
Man Who Saw Everything.

Is this a clue to help us unravel Levy’s new novel? Yes. And no.

The pre-publication blurb says the book is about "beauty, envy, and carelessness". Another clue.

The book itself contains the phrase "about loneliness, love, youth, beauty".

That’s enough clues. What is this book about? Well, it’s about all of the above and more besides. It’s about living under surveillance whether by state or family. It’s about Brexit.

It’s also about the weight of history. In her seasonal quartet, Ali Smith is cycling through the seasons while simultaneously showing us how the events of linear time influence one another (each book has a historical event that ties to current events). Here, Levy uses a man’s fractured mind to compress time and run multiple timeframes in parallel. She also makes several (oblique) references to Schrodinger’s famous cat experiment:

”We don’t know whether Luna is alive or dead”.
She lifted Hannah on to her lap and start to draw a cat…

Of course, in Schrodinger’s experiment the fate of the cat is unknown until the box is opened. It is popularly misinterpreted as simply that, whereas Schrodinger designed his (thought) experiment to illustrate that the cat was, in fact, simultaneously alive and dead until the box was opened. It is not as simple as not knowing until you look: in Schrodinger’s world, both possibilities exist together until observation when the quantum state collapses to a single outcome.

The story, as we read it, begins in 1988 when Saul Adler has a minor road traffic accident while waiting to have his photograph taken by his girlfriend, Jennifer Moreau, on the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing. Then she dumps him and they head in opposite directions - she to America and he to East Germany. We follow Saul to the GDR where he falls in love again (more than once).

But there are hints that things are not quite what they seem. Saul seems to have some kind of prescience:

A light breeze blew into the GDR, but I knew it came from America. A wind from another time. It brought with it
the salt scent of seaweed and oysters. And wool. A child’s knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a chair. Time
and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.”

Saul finds himself telling people about what will happen in the future. How does he know?

I won’t spoil the plot, but everything takes on a new perspective at about the halfway point and we realise what we have been reading is not quite what we thought it was.

It starts to feel like we are Schrodinger’s cat, or that Saul is that cat. Simultaneously in two different times, waiting for the observation that will collapse it down to a single outcome that makes sense. I am not sure if it is Saul who is waiting for that or the reader.

Coincidentally, Saul has been being watched. He grew up under an authoritarian father (or perhaps he didn’t). And Jennifer, who took the photographs at the start, is a photographer who made him her prime subject, always watching him, always taking pictures of him.

A lot of this book seems to be about the effect of being seen on the person or thing being seen.

I became completely engrossed in this book. Part of it is because, as I started out by saying, Levy writes in a way that my brain responds too very positively. But I also loved the way the story develops and the huge number of ideas Levy throws out. I read it all in a single sitting (I was fortunate that I had a day of waiting around for something so I could sit and read uninterrupted for a long time). I would have been very cross with anyone who tried to take me away from it before I finished.

"In three days I was travelling to East Germany, the GDR, to research cultural opposition to the rise of fascism in the 1930s at the Humboldt University. Although my German was reasonably fluent they had assigned me a translator. His name was Walter Müller. I was to stay for two weeks in East Berlin with his mother and sister, who had offered me a room in their tenement apartment near the university. Walter Müller was part of the reason I had nearly been run over on the zebra crossing. He had written to say that his sister, whose name was Katrin – but the family called her Luna – was a big Beatles fan. ….. It had been Jennifer’s idea to take a photograph of myself crossing the zebra on Abbey Road to give to Luna."

The book begins in 1988, the first party narrator is Saul Adler is a 28-year old, narcissistic historian, son of a recently deceased domineering communist father.

Saul’s mother was the Jewish daughter of a German University professor, and who was an escapee from Nazi Germany at the age of 8, Saul’s grandmother having given her a string of pearls together with her one suitcase. When Saul’s mother dies, Saul’s father gives him the pearls, only for Saul to insist on wearing them at all times, a sign of his emerging bisexuality, which alienates him from his working class father and bullying working class brother Matthew.

At the book’s opening Saul is lightly struck and flesh-wounded by a car on the Abbey Road zebra crossing under the gaze and lens of his photographer girlfriend Jennifer Moreau.

As the German driver asks if he is OK and explains what happens three things strike us: alternative versions of history, a small anachronism, and perhaps an anomaly in Saul’s honest:

"I smiled at his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour ……

While he spoke, he gazed at the rectangular object in his hand. The object was speaking. There was definitely a voice inside it, a man’s voice, and he was saying something angry and insulting …..

When I told him I was twenty-eight, he didn’t believe me and asked for my age again."

Saul and Jennifer make love and then Jennifer abruptly curtails their relationship, saying she is moving to America.

Saul goes to the GDR, starts an affair with Walter, buries his father’s ashes (which he carries in a matchbox) on his beloved communist soil, and is seduced by his sister Luna. Luna, an intense ballerina, is obsessed with a Jaguar she believes is roaming near the family’s dacha. Instead of helping her escape Saul tries, via Rainer (a University colleague of Walter’s) to arrange for Walter to escape, although realising too late that instead he has betrayed Walter to the Stasi.

But again during this tale, we see some apparent oddites and mixings of time:

"A light breeze blew into the GDR, but I knew it came from America. A wind from another time. It brought with it the salt scent of seaweed and oysters. And wool. A child’s knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a chair. Time and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.

‘Listen, Luna.’ I felt as if I were floating out of my body as I spoke. ‘In September 1989, the Hungarian government will open the border for East German refugees wanting to flee to the West. Then the tide of people will be unstoppable. By November 1989, the borders will be open and within a year your two Germanys will become one.’"

The book then shifts to 2018. Saul Adler steps onto Abbey Road and is struck by a German driver Wolfgang who attempts to blame Saul for the accident, while trying to ignore his own distracted driving

"I smiled at his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour ……

I was lying on the road. A mobile phone lay next to my hand. A male voice inside it was speaking angry and insulting words.

When I told him I was twenty-eight he didn’t believe me. "

And then Saul finds himself in hospital, surrounded by Stasi agents, with again history being disputed

"I could hear him explaining to my doctor, who might also be a Stasi informer, that I was a historian. My subject was communist Eastern Europe and somehow I had transported myself back to the GDR, a trip I had made when I was twenty-eight in the year 1988. Now, nearly thirty years later, while I was lying on my back in University College Hospital, I seemed to have gone back in time to that trip in the GDR in my youth."

Saul is visited by Jennifer Moreau, who has oddly aged 30 years whereas Saul is still 28, by his elderly and dying father – when Saul points out he buried him in a matchbox, his father says “I think you were remembering a very small coffin”. Jennifer we learn had Saul’s son, who then died suddenly at the age of 4, Saul having visited Jennifer when he fell ill, but then deserted her for a quick fling with her neighbour, just before their son died in her arms.

And we realise, if we did not already, that Saul’s accident has shattered his memory, leading fragments of different periods of history to flow through his mind, that his narcissism has turned into literal mental self-absorbtion, that even oddities are reflections of what he has seen.

"I realized there was glass everywhere and that some of it was inside my head. I had gazed at my reflection in the wing mirror of his car and my reflection had fallen into me ……

For a start, I had his Jaguar inside my head. His wing mirror, from which he had glimpsed the man in pieces crossing the road, had shattered. A thousand and one slivers of glass were floating inside my head."

Certainly this is an intriguing book – although perhaps one where the concentration on analogy (for example the binary offset of feminine/masculine, East/West, past/present) and imagery (at one point for example Saul mentions that while he was oppressed by his father, Walter was oppressed by his fatherland) rather overtakes a story which lacks interest.

I also struggled with Saul as a character and the interaction between he and Jennifer:

But overall worth investigating and I look forward to hearing more about the author's intentions when this is published

In 1989 Saul is hit by a car. He breaks up with his girlfriend before leaving to study in communist Germany. He gets into relationships with his translator and his translator's sister.
In 2016, he is hit by a car. He spends the following days slipping in and out of memories of the past.