Andrew Meehan’s Instant Fires sets the tricky feelings and follies of new love against the heft of family history. The German-Irish lovers Ute Pfeiffer and Seanie Donnellan come together within a single week in July 2014. Crucially, they come together in Heidelberg, a venerable university town in Southwest Germany. The city has, in recent years, provided the setting for some vital examinations of German identity: Ijoma Mangold’s The German Crocodile and Saša Stanišić’s Where You Come From. The Heidelberg of Meehan’s novel is a postcard town, populated by languid wine-drinkers and Nobel laureates, surrounded by vineyards and watched over by a formidable castle. As the World Cup Final approaches, the streets swell with midsummer madness. Meehan uses this confluence of summer, city and football to craft a romance of unusual compassion and uneasy loveliness.
“Meehan uses this confluence of summer, city and football to craft a romance of unusual compassion and uneasy loveliness.”
Ute is back in her hometown after twenty years abroad, most of them spent in sterile comfort with an Irishman named Tort. Returning to her childhood home, ‘the loveliest courtyard in a town full of lovely courtyards’, she finds her parents in decline. Her father, Julius, once the town’s foremost glassmaker, has suffered a series of strokes. He spends much of his time looking through old photo albums. Ute’s mother, Christa, cares for him with schnapps and marijuana – a cocktail which at least calms his ailing mind. Enter Seanie. From Roscommon but living (and grieving) in Germany, the Stephen Hero-type protagonist takes residence in Julius’s workshop and assists with the old man’s care. He and Ute meet outside the Pfeiffer home when he drives over a chicken coop. From this endearing clumsiness, Seanie emerges as a romantic foil and counterpart in Ute’s reckoning with her past.
Meehan writes with special tenderness for Julius, and the interactions between Ute and her parents are among the novel’s richest. Christa, a seemingly peripheral character, is particularly finely drawn. Her flippant devotion to Julius and hesitance around Ute grow bittersweet as we learn about the disappointments of her early life. There is a brave light-heartedness in her words, familiar to anyone who has cared for those with degenerative illnesses: ‘if you are going to stay for the summer’, she warns Ute, ‘you should not be surprised by anything’.
Amidst this tattered generation and the euphoria of the World Cup, Meehan reflects, albeit obliquely, on Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust. We learn that Julius’s father, an ophthalmologist, was a Josef Mengele type who experimented cruelly on his patients. We glimpse Ute’s shame only in snatches. A detail of baroque horror (a collection of prisoners’ eyes ‘like sweets in a jar’) arrives in the midst of Seanie and Ute’s first date, and immediately precedes their leaping recklessly into the Neckar river. Guilt and debt are famously synonymous in German. The ‘Schuld’ involved in Holocaust commemoration is an ongoing (and unfinishable) project, known as ‘the culture of remembrance’ (Erinnerungskultur). Readers may question whether this aspect of Ute’s story (and Heidelberg’s past) is handled with such care as would truly deepen understanding. EH
Words: Eve Hawksworth
Instant Fires
