The Fox in the Attic

The Human Predicament #1

by Richard Hughes

A tale of enormous suspense and growing horror, The Fox in the Attic is the widely acclaimed first part of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." Set in the early 1920s, the book centers on Augustine, a young man from an aristocratic Welsh family who has come of age in the aftermath of World War I. Unjustly suspected of having had a hand in the murder of a young girl, Augustine takes refuge in the remote castle of Bavarian relatives. There his hopeless love for his devout cousin Mitzi blinds him to the hate that will lead to the rise of German fascism. The book reaches a climax with a brilliant description of the Munich putsch and a disturbingly intimate portrait of Adolph Hitler.

The Fox in the Attic , like its no less remarkable sequel The Wooden Shepherdess , offers a richly detailed, Tolstoyan overview of the modern world in upheaval. At once a novel of ideas and an exploration of the dark spaces of the heart, it is a book in which the past returns in all its original uncertainty and strangeness.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Germany, Classics, War, Novels, British Literature

326 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.

Several other authors on Goodreads are also named Richard Hughes.

Reviews

[Kate♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5stars

I feel bad giving this book too low of a rating cause I'm sure a lot of people would enjoy it, but this just wasn't the book I was hoping for when I picked it up. I had wanted gothic horror/terror, but instead this was much more of a war-centric novel which I simply do not enjoy very much. The writing was lovely and the story was unique, but just not what I wanted.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm suspending judgment on this for the time being; Hughes said that he only published 'The Human Predicament' in sections because otherwise it might never get published at all. So this is only one episode in a much longer work, kind of like taking the third volume of Proust on its own, except even less complete in itself. After just this book, the Tolstoyan project seems a little heavy handed: private scene with fictional characters over here; public scene with historical characters over here; socio-philosophical reflections on the early twentieth century over here. The book's closing image starts to bring the reflections together with the private, but the Hitler chapters still seem a little formally disconnected. I suspect that this is the sort of thing that gets resolved as the project unfolds, and I'm really looking forward to The Wooden Shepherdess. Too bad he only got those two volumes done.
Large-scale project issues aside, The Fox... has everything you will love about Hughes: the light touch; the fluid prose; the just-difficult-enough-to-be-interesting-but-not-so-difficult-you-need-a-guidebook imagery, symbolism and technique; the understanding that the particular is only of interest when it reflects on the universal and vice versa; the willingness to break modernist and anti-modernist taboos whenever the book will benefit from such a breaking. Great stuff.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

... just started ... but here is something I never heard before.

It is widely reported that the German people, and the army, were shocked when Germany agreed to an armistice and basically admitted they had lost WWI. It became one of Hitler's main selling points, and a huge lie, that Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by Jews and Communists.

Hughes writes that the English were equally shocked to have won. After years of simply feeding young men into a death machine in the trenches (14 million died in WWI), suddenly the war was over and they were victors. They were stunned!

I am at the point in "Fox in the Attic" where the main character has just relocated from England to Munich. It is 1923. I am anticipating Hughes' take on the Hitler beer hall putsch, which is the first major section in my own novel-in-progress.

AFTER HIGH EXPECTATIONS, THE FOX BECAME QUITE A DISAPPOINTING READ

After a better than adequate beginning, The Fox in the Attic simply lost itself once Augustine arrived in Munich.

... The descriptions of the Hitler putsch were not dramatically rendered, and I believe there were some factual errors.

... There was little character development of the Nazis or the presumed main characters Augustine and his family.

... Several characters appeared for the purpose of giving a report on some incident or other and then disappeared.

... The plot itself became a confused mess.

I confess that I skimmed the last half of the book, but that was all I could force myself to do.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 3 out of 5]

 
Fiction, Politics, Little Synthesis

The gate clicked sharply and shed its cascade as two men passed through. Both were heavily loaded in oilskins. The elder and more tattered one carried two shotguns, negligently, and a brace of golden plover were tied to the bit of old rope he wore knotted round his middle: glimpses of a sharp-featured weather-beaten face showed from within his bonneted sou'-wester, but mouth and even chin were hidden in a long weeping moustache. The younger man was springy and tall and well-built and carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child.

This passage comes from near the bottom of the first page of Richard Hughes' extraordinary novel, following a moody description of the Pembrokeshire coast on a moist day. Typical British rural fiction until you get to that dead child, which brings you up with a shock. But more shocking still is that it is not until the end of Book One, 100 pages in, that we learn who the child is. The younger man, whose name is Augustine, carries her back to his stately home, in which he lives alone after his elder brother was killed in the War some years before. He calls the police and then disappears, first to London and then to the stately home of his sister and her politician husband, where he enjoys himself playing with his niece Polly, a six-year-old who is very much alive. Despite this strange opening, Book One plays almost entirely in the vein of domestic comedy. For 85% of its length, it is pretty terrific.

Neither the comedy nor the unexpected jolts of the macabre should surprise anyone who has read Hughes' 1929 masterpiece, A High Wind in Jamaica, a book about children that no child should ever see. [The link is to my review; look it up is you don't already know it.] Written two decades before Lord of the Flies, it prefigures it by showing how feral children can be inches below the surface. Both books are moral fables, but both also have political implications. Writing in 1954, Golding references both the trauma of WW2 and the chill of the Cold War. Hughes' earlier book came from the time of moral wandering between the wars; its lightheartedness was in tune with the frivolity of the times. But when he returned to the period, writing The Fox in the Attic in 1960—as the first novel in a planned interwar trilogy called The Human Predicament, no less—he aimed at more serious goals. Still reeling from the Second War, he was now struggling to work out how, in barely two decades, the depleted German people could have come to embrace the Nazi abomination.

If only he had been content to do it obliquely, as in Jamaica, but no. Knowing what was coming, I read through his Book One with much enjoyment, thinking I knew what he was doing. Surely, he was going through the playful escapist tropes of interwar fiction, in order to turn gradually to a grittier style later on, much as Kazuo Ishiguro does in The Remains of the Day ? I still think this may have been Hughes' intention, but alas in Books Two and Three his control of style deserts him. Actually it happens at the end of Book One, which goes into three chapters of politico-moral psychology about Self and Other before returning to the story. Did his editor not remind him of the adage to Show and not Tell?

In Book Two, Augustine goes off to visit some distant relatives in a Schloss not far from Munich. Hughes is actually quite clever in showing, among the inhabitants of the castle, several distinct examples of the political beliefs that sprang up in the years following WW1. Among these, naturally, is the particular strain of Germanic patriotism that provided fertile soil for the Nazi party to spread its roots. Plus several other sentiments, such as the dream of restoring the Bavarian monarchy, that the Nazis could turn to their advantage. The background action of Book Two is the failed Munich Beer-Hall Putsch of November 1923, which ended in the arrest of Hitler. Again, Hughes is skillful in having us glimpse these events offstage, but only slightly so. For the most part, Hitler is presented as a slightly comic figure, though with hints of his ultimate potential. Unfortunately, though, the oblique approach demands a lot of the reader. There is a parade of names—Eisner, Arco von Valley, Rathenau, Rupprecht, Ludendorff, Kahr, Hanfstaengl, and many others—that it is assumed mean something to the reader, who will not receive adequate background from the Hughes novel alone. Wikipedia is useful.

All this is told in the interstices of Augustine's visit to Schloss Lorienburg. Once more, he plays with the younger children. He falls hopelessly in love with the eldest daughter. But he gradually loses stature, as the tone vacillates between melodrama and silliness. Book Three remains with Augustine in Bavaria for some chapters and returns to the English estate for others. Is Hughes perhaps trying for some kind of grand synthesis by juxtaposing the two styles? If so, it doesn't work; the combination of comic and consequential no longer shocks; the book has become a shapeless mess.

All the same, let's not end on a negative note. The man can really write, and there are brilliant paragraphs throughout. Here is one where Augustine, an Anglican atheist (the author's term), comes upon the baroque chapel in the castle:

…then suddenly Augustine noticed that from every cranny and interstice of that vasty tornado towering under the God-light from above there were miniature heads of child-angels peeping! In their rather seeet way these were quite lovely—and palpably all portraits: every child in the village that long-ago year must have been singly portrayed here: this was a whole child-generation of Dora Lorienburg. One Sunday centuries ago all these fresh young faces up there must have been mirrored by the First-Communion young faces bowed over the altar-rail below, each carved face with its own living counterpart. But whereas in time those faces at the rail had grown old and disillusioned and coarse—and had all died, generations ago—these through the centuries had remained forever singing: immortal, and forever child.

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. A word-picture like this says as much about time and belief as a hundred pages that attempt the same task more explicitly.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Feliks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its a gorgeous reading experience. For a long while, I've underestimated Hughes based on his one famous work, 'A High Wind in Jamaica' which --however well done--I never took to be a serious or formidable novel. It seemed delicate and toy-like.

But in this work, 'Fox'--all the true talent Hughes has in the fundamental mechanics of good prose are well on display and its a happy reminder of just what a fine, smooth, adroit hand he possessed at the craft. His scenes are wonderful; one glides effortlessly from page to page following wherever he leads, and you soon develop utter trust. He never stumbles or trips.

Hughes relishes abrupt confrontations between characters who are utterly unlike each other--specimens from different backgrounds and upbringing--and carefully detailing the various results. In 'Jamaica' it was children vs pirates, in 'Fox' its a quiet, young, naive English upperclassman vs politically-charged, hardcore, seething German gentry.

You will find his writing lush and soft, feathery, and definitely his own. There's something about what content he chooses to insert in each paragraph, which has a way of pulling the reader along; some way of orchestrating his character's inner thoughts with their observations of their surroundings..very enveloping, as one reads. Savory voice.

All these generalities being said, what can one state in particular about this specific novel? I think its audacious. Its got a brilliant technique which I'm surprised hasn't been taken up by other writers subsequent to this intriguing tale. Its that technique which makes it just as 'disturbing, menacing, growing horror' as the books blurbs claim. Truly penetrating unease and nervousness. You get a palpable sense that something shattering is on the way. That the novel does just this one thing, is fabulous: aka, 'The suspense is killing me...I hope it lasts!'

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Sutherland has described The Fox in the Attic as 'arguably one of the very finest works of the post-war period - if one of the very least conventional'. I found it enthralling and frustrating by turns. The sections dealing with Augustine's personal relations with his family and with his German hosts in the latter two thirds of the book are wonderfully done and consistently engaging; the historical passages dealing with the political chaos in 1920s Bavaria were often confusing (although perhaps that's the point). This was one of the first works of fiction to feature Adolf Hitler as a character and his snarling insecurities after the failure of the beer hall putsch are vividly realised. This is the first part of an unfinished Tolstoyan epic set in the inter-war period and the interplay of the political and the personal is extremely well done. Augustine's ignorance of the madness (the 'fox in the attic') unfolding around him - even among his hosts - is symbolic of the numerous blind eyes turned to the gathering Nazi menace in later years. I should add three cheers for the second hand bookshops of York - not only was I able to find a 1975 Penguin copy of The Fox in the Attic at a very reasonable price, but also three copies of its sequel, The a Wooden Sheperdess, and a pristine copy of Hughes's most famous work, A High Wind in Jamaica, all within twenty minutes or so. Waterstones had none of them.

[Molly Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of deceiving, the first half of the book I loved (which centered around the killing of a young girl, the body of whom the main character, Augustine, discovers). The second half of the book slowed down a bit too much for me as it began to incorporate the dawning of World War II. Too bad Hughes never finished his trilogy.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hughes lapses into beautiful writing on occasion, but I had too many unanswered questions. Well, maybe not that many, but: why this story arc? It seemed so strange; we barely get established and acquaint ourselves with the above-stairs and below-stairs characters in Wales and England before the protagonist Augustine trundles off to Germany so that the author can show us some crusty German gentry, burgeoning Nazism, and Hitler's 1923 putsch.

I never see the point of inserting real people into novels.

Why kill off a young child and then never reveal who killed her, and why? Was her death that unimportant to the novel that it needed to go unsolved? The novel starts beautifully, with a description of sea marshes and two hunters returning from a shoot, and quickly shocks us. One hunter is carrying two shotguns and "a brace of golden plover." The other, whom we find out is Augustine, "carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child."

Why is a fox living in the house of a German aristocrat?

So Lothar with Augustine's half-Bradbury still safe inside his shirt betook himself to his gymnasium; and at the first whiff of all the delicious manliness within its echoing portals he snorted like a horse. The abiding smell of men's gymnasiums is a cold composite one, compounded of the sweet strawberry smell of fresh male sweat, the reek of thumped leather and the dust trampled into the grain of the floor and confirmed there by the soapy mops of cleaners; but to eighteen-year-old Lothar this tang meant everything that the wind on the heath meant to Petulengro and he snorted at it now like a horse let out to spring grass.

---

For Augustine had fallen in love, of course. As a well-made kid glove will be so exactly filled with hand that one can't even insert a bus ticket between them, so the membrane of Augustine's mind was now exactly shaped and stretched to hold Mitzi's peerless image and nothing more: it felt stretched to bursting by it and couldn't conceivably find a hair's-breadth room for anything else.

---

Competently and gently, like dusting fragile porcelain - but a bit absently, as if the porcelain was unloved - Nellie wiped the eyes with a swab of cotton wool. Then she made little spills of the cotton wool, dipped them in oil and twiddled them in those defenseless ears and nostrils. The infant's head was too heavy for it to be able to move it but every other inch of its body jerked and shook in paroxysms of rage and sneezing, and at every such movement all its tender contours crumpled and collapsed like a half-deflated balloon.

N----- count: 1

"Thus here there had been no adequate replacement for the once-unbridgeable hereditary castes and trades which had now so long been melting: now, too, that derided nigger-line at Calais was growing shamefast, weakening..."

[Frank Muller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intimate portrait of Adolf Hitler's youthful efforts on behalf of the nascent Nazi party is worth the price of admission - I always think that Hitler is a boring topic, but Hughes delivers with his description of an injured and hallucinating "Uncle 'Dolph" hiding in a friend's attic (he's not the "fox," though). Hughes, as in _High Wind In Jamaica_ excels at writing children. It really is remarkable the way the man can conjure them up. His children ring true to me.

For all this novel lacks in the way of continuity and plot, Hughes makes up for by being a genius. This isn't a good novel, but it is a good novelist. Also, Weimar Germany is nothing short of fascinating. Augustine's tour through some of Munich's Weimar underbelly is another highlight. Therefore, I give it a "really liked it."

[Nicholas During · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are a historical fiction (or military fiction) buff this is a book for you. Completely in the vein of War and Peace (and Walter Scott? I think it must be) this is one of those big Tolstoyan dramas where both fated historical events that can't be changed intersect with the daily, naive lives of the characters. It does however have a modern feel to it, with very short chapters and a rather strange authorial voice popping back and forth into the text now again.

It also, as behooves a Tolstoyan imitation, many like philosophical asides, many of which come from the rather silly protagonist Augustine, but others from the author are not so silly and have a great way of evoking a time and place (Bavarian, 1923) that is both ancient and modern, provincial and global, liberated and educated and really rather stupid. But when you are in Hitler's head you realize that you better be reading really fucking carefully. The Beer Hall Pusch scene is justly celebrated I think. And I did enjoy going through the rounds of characters, both in the Wales section and the Bavarian section. There is no doubt that Hughes can write, but towards the end I was losing a bit of patience in the increasingly frequent philosophical digressions. I'm not sure if I'll be reading the sequel, The Wooden Shepherdess, in the near future.

Still, it is definitely a classic example of historical fiction. A genre which I often find powerful and interesting (and I know I'm not the only one). If you agree with that, you'll probably enjoy this book.

[Alarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read The Fox in the Attic as though it were a novel, because it is sold that way. However, it was intended to be the first installment of a longer work, The Human Predicament. It’s not so surprising then that I felt I was dangling, unsure where Hughes intended his story to go and wondering why he left some shocking plot lines unresolved.

The writing and my enjoyment of it took dips and turns. At times it was lyrically lovely, especially in describing the countryside in England and in Germany. At times it was eerie, reminding me of Twin Peaks. I enjoyed the more conventional, homier sections about country people. I was intrigued by some of the astonishing developments. Then I was bored almost to quitting by preachiness when Hughes dove into philosophy and politics. I have little interest in the 1923 politics in Germany or in meeting young Adolph Hitler. Certain quirky and creepy elements continued to pull me along, but basically I averaged loves and hates for a middling rating.

It ended rather abruptly, making me wonder, “Now what?” but not really caring enough to read part II even though I see it got better Amazon ratings.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read and enjoyed A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes so when I saw this one going cheap in a second-hand bookshop I bought it and was not disappointed. It appears that it is part of a larger work called The Human Predicament, so I'm not sure where I'll find the rest of it (though it is said to have been unfinished), but I certainly enjoyed this part very much.

In this part a young man, Augustine Penry-Herbert, finds the body of a young girl in a swamp in South Wales, and it turns out that she was to have been a playmate for his niece Polly. The beginning, set in set in Britain in the period between the two world wars, is redolent of the TV series Downton Abbey, showing the life of upper-class British people, and incidentally gives the political background of the decline of the Liberal Party of Asquith and Lloyd George, and the rise of the socialist Labour Party.

Augustine then travels to visit distant relatives in post-war Germany. He came with an image of it formed in Britain of the "new" Germany of the Weimar Republic, a peace-loving democracy, awash with artistic creativity from which the old Prussian militarism had vanished. Most of what he knew of the German branch of his family came from his sister Mary who had visited them before the war, but the little cousins she had told him about had grown up, Franz into a fanatical German nationalist, and his sister Mitzi into a passionate Christian mystic, which the secularised British Augustine cannot even perceive, much less respond to. The family had also grown, so they had four younger siblings, who adopted Augustine as their elder brother since their own were too aloof.

Augustine finds himself adrift in the alien culture, where nothing is what it seems. Several of those he meets are involved in the Munich beerhall putsch, which the older generation hopes will lead to a restoration of the Bavarian monarchy, while the younger hopes will lead to a strong Germany, but neither is prepared for the upstart Corporal Hitler, who dominates the scene until he is arrested.

As a historical novel it gives a good feel for the times, at least in the view of the upper-class families, both British and German, who are central to the story.

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a soft spot for Richard Hughes. I read High Wind in Jamaica a little over thirty years ago and think it is a superb first novel. Also, unlike most of other British writers who came up between the two World Wars, Hughes didn’t ignore those strange Europeans and their modernist goings on, but seemed to be translating modernism into an English vernacular. But for anyone who read Hughes’ books as they were first published it must have been a frustrating experience. There was a ten years wait for the second novel and while Hazard is also a promising work, after ten years something more than promise might have been expected. Then there was a twenty years gap before The Fox in the Attic, the first part of a planned trilogy, The Human Predicament. There was another ten years before the second part arrived and the third was never completed.

I find The Human Predicament a slightly pompous title, but it indicates an ambition to sum up the age, the years between the two World Wars. The Fox in the Attic is an ambitious work that doesn’t really gel. It is attempting to do a lot, but the different ambitions don’t really come together…but maybe the different plot strands, for instance, do pull together in the later books. It is set in 1923. Augustine, the central character, is from a privileged British background. Like Richard Hughes, he was too young to fight in the Great War, but on leaving school he had joined the army…then the War ended and there is a sense of anti-climax and impasse. He lives in his inherited country house in Wales, ignoring the social niceties and functions that rural gentry are expected to follow. His sister, Mary, is married to a Dorset landowner and Liberal politician. There is a discourse about the crisis of liberalism and if we know our British history we will recognise it as a crisis that the Liberal Party doesn’t get over. The novel begins, however, with Augustine having found the corpse of a girl. By unconvincing plot contrivance, the girl is the niece of Mary’s housekeeper – the novel introducing the girl’s mother and a life around her.

Augustine visits some distant relations in Germany, near Munich, and the novel introduces a sort of compare and contrast between Great Britain and Germany. The family Augustine visits are his social equivalents, old landowners: the older generation seem stuck in the past, dreaming of the Kaiser returning, the younger ones are under the spell of an aggressive nationalism. During Augustine’s visit, Hitler attempts his putsch in Munich. The Fox in the Attic follows this in great detail, but it is a separate plot strand: characters (including Hitler) who take part in the putsch are introduced, but then they drop out of the book. There is the sense that the novel in looking to the events that formed the age. Although his relations are excited by the political events, Augustine has little interest and nothing to do with them. He has fallen in love with Mitzi, the daughter of his host, but she is in crisis, her weak eyesight failing and falling into blindness.

My problem is that I don’t know how all this different concerns come together. But maybe they are not supposed to come together. Maybe Hughes is constructing a ‘modernist’ narrative, the different strands opening up views of the inter-War world, but the reader is left to pull things together however they want. Or maybe the next volume will pull things together. Overall, I found The Fox In the Attic an intriguing and readable book, but the whole was less successful than the bits – in fact, I wasn’t even sure what the whole was doing.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a few other reviewers have already stated concerning "Fox in the Attic": What a disappointment! I really liked this author when I read "In Hazard" and "High Wind in Jamaica", two great novels. I forgot who it was of the classic novelists, maybe Dostoyevsky (but I doubt it because I nearly fell out of my Athens apartment window with some of his boring passages), who said the primary goal of the novelist is to entertain. Assuming the integrity of Hughes, I think that that is what he thought he was doing. Both of the aforesaid novels alone, which I would read again, will assure his place in the bright stars of literary authorship. However, now he is writing about the early years of the Hitler blight entwined with other spectral plots and characterizations, the period of which is "entertainingly" and masterfully crafted by Ron Hansen in "Hitler's Niece" and in Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts". I like reading about this period of modern history, especially when it is historical fiction in the hands of literary writers; but trying to get through "Fox in the Attic" almost had me falling out of my New York window, which is always fatal for grown-ups. Mercifully, Hughes wrote very short chapters, which allowed me to ingest this book like Vitamin capsules, knowing by taking them they were doing me good but not sure exactly how.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Fox In the Attic" could have been better if Hughes hadn't tried to mix together a few themes (and truth and fiction) so forcefully and persistently. The narrative was a little frantic sometimes and I had the impression that Hughes was trying to kill too many birds with one stone. His ideas about Hitler's personality were interesting. Some great writing was evident, but in overall it's not that memorable.

[Martha Garvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

First 75 pages are remarkable. Hughes writes flawlessly from the child's point of view. Somehow, though, once he sends his protagonist from Wales to Germany, the narrative unravels. Still worth the read.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Fox in the Attic is the first book of what was meant to be a trilogy, so you can be forgiven for feeling left hanging at the end.

Mostly the book aims to anchor you in the history of the first quarter of the 20th century, with the main character embodying the innocent young Anglo, benign and immature, ignorant and at loose in the world. The year is 1923 and Augustine, who is also 23, is living on an estate he inherited in Wales. It’s an accidental inheritance, the intended heir, slightly older than Augustine, having been killed on the battlefields of WWI, the war that was supposed to end all wars.

The story opens with Augustine carrying a dead child across the damp autumn fields, setting us up for the death of innocence. Augustine, a loner without local connections, is resented by the community for his aloofness. After Augustine finds the dead child while out hunting, the townsfolk enjoy making him a suspect, though the unsupervised girl apparently drowned in a pond. Augustine takes a break at the home of his sister Mary, where he basks in the adoration of his young niece Polly. There is a good deal of context about the political times in the U.K., Mary’s husband being a politician. Augustine doesn’t seem greatly interested in politics.

In need of a change of scenery, Augustine arranges to stay with Bavarian relatives. These and other German characters show what danger and negativity hurt pride and humiliation can engender. Fresh from the defeat of WWI and impoverished by the terms of peace, German society is restive. Hitler himself is a character and the reader witnesses the (fictionalised) Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, and Hitler’s arrest. Augustine again appears oblivious to politics and the world. He spends his time playing with children and falls in love with his silent cousin, the 17-year old Mitzi, who goes blind, a parallel to Augustine’s own metaphorical blindness. He doesn’t catch sight of the fox in the attic, the sly animal lurking in rooms that have been closed off.

It was an interesting read. I felt there was some inelegant “switching gears” — going from narrative plot to passages of historical context. I enjoyed the Bavarian setting with its snow, sleighs and the “sugary monstrosities” of its Catholic churches, as Augustine puts it. There is a touching side plot about a woman who loses her child (the dead girl of the book’s initial scene). I wasn’t crazy about the fictionalised Hitler and other real-life German historical figures. The pace picked up in the final third of the book, but I did not become invested enough to pick up the sequel.

[Kirsten · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wales in den frühen 1920er Jahren: Augustine lebt ein isoliertes Leben auf dem Landsitz seiner Familie mit nur wenig Kontakt zu den Menschen in der Gemeinde. Als er die Leiche eines jungen Mädchens findet, wendet sich der Verdacht schnell gegen den jungen Mann, der kaum jemand kennt. Augustine flüchtet, erst nach London, später zu Verwandten nach Bayern. Aber auch dort findet er nicht die Ruhe, nach der er sich sehnt.

Es war interessant, die Ereignisse in München mit Augustines Augen zu sehen, der die Dinge ganz anders wahrnahm, als sie wirklich waren. Aber das ist auch das einzig Gute, was ich über das Buch sagen kann. Augustine ist ein junger Mann, der in einer isolierten Umgebung aufgewachsen ist, den Umgang mit anderen Menschen nie wirklich lernen konnte. Im Münchener Trubel ist er schnell überfordert und die Personen in seiner Umgebung sind ihm keine große Hilfe, sich zurecht zu finden. Ich fand die Charaktere durchweg oberflächlich. Was um sie herum vorging, hat sie nicht interessiert. Im Gegenteil: die Ereignisse in München waren für sie ein Abenteuer und sie hatten keinerlei Weitsicht, wie sich die Dinge entwickeln könnten. Augustine sucht in diesem Trubel seinen Weg, aber er hat bei seinen neuen Freunden keine Hilfe. Auch als er sich verliebt, wird er zum Spielball einer zutiefst oberflächlichen Clique.

Der Klappentext klang vielversprechend, aber das Buch hat nichts davon halten können.

[Pável Granados · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si le pudiéramos preguntar al protagonista de este libro, el joven Augustine, qué tipo de novela habría de inspirar su historia, seguramente respondería que una de amor. Una apasionada novela de amor con las aventuras típicas de este tipo de narraciones. Con algo de folletín, porque al final del volumen –el primero de una trilogía inconclusa– no sabemos aún si será consumada su pasión por su prima Mitzi. Esta prima, que no nos ha parecido a lo largo de la narración especialmente simpática, tiende, por el contrario, al misticismo y a la reclusión. Augustine, por su parte, tampoco es un personaje atractivo. De hecho, ha huido de su Inglaterra natal porque luego de rescatar el cuerpo de una niña entre las marismas de Gales, su carácter hosco y distante lo convierten, a ojos del pueblo, en el principal sospechoso de asesinarla. Por esta razón, decide escapar a Alemania, en donde tiene familia, igualmente aristocrática, que habita el castillo de Lorienburg, un sitio imaginario pero situado en las orillas del Danubio. Allí conoce a sus parientes, y en especial a la mencionada Mitzi, una joven ciega de la que se enamora repentina y apasionadamente. Novela de amor, dije arriba… Y sin embargo, esta obra tiene como centro un momento sombrío: el mes de noviembre de 1923, cuando Adolf Hitler irrumpió en la Historia alemana, intentando un golpe de estado, en una cantina de Múnich. Estos hechos llegan relatados por un personaje, al castillo en que Augustine vive su historia de amor. Hasta cierto punto, los personajes centrales de la historia toman con cierta indiferencia las noticias de Múnich, pues finalmente son vientos lejanos, noticias de los diarios, nada trascendente… Mientras tanto, Hitler huye a esconderse a casa de un amigo suyo, Ernst Hanfstaengl, adonde lo capturó la policía días más tarde. Es la historia del primer fracaso (aparente) de Hitler, su entrada a la Historia con el pie izquierdo, pero asimismo el arraigo y lento crecimiento de una enredadera venenosa. Por desgracia, sólo conozco la primera parte de esta serie, la cual está escrita con una gran delicadeza y narrada desde insólitos puntos de vista. Con frecuencia, el narrador elige continuar la historia vista desde la habitación de uno de los mayordomos, desde una cabaña abandonada o desde el inquietante ático que le da título al libro. O bien, desde esa cantina alemana, escenario del fracaso de Hitler. Escenarios azarosos, como queriéndonos decir que desde cualquier lugar salta la liebre. O la muerte. La cual no salta, pero nos hace caer por sitios bastante curiosos. Sé que Richard Hughes (1900-1976) entrevistó a gente cercana al Führer y que documentó los días de Hitler hasta su ascenso al poder. Para finalizar, me gustaría decir que, para más señas sobre la calidad de este autor, Hughes fue gran amigo de Robert Graves, y que juntos hicieron una revista literaria en su juventud.

Richard Hughes. El zorro en el ático / The Fox in the Attic (1960), tr. de Claudia Casanova, introd. de Hilary Mantel. Barcelona, Ático de los Libros, 2015.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels slightly unfair to judge the book as it's part of a never finished trilogy and it feels like judging the first third of a novel separately from the rest of the book. Not entirely a completely informed way of looking at a book. Yet the layering of perspectives that Hughes brings to the story, the way characters see and speak right past each other while all the while assuming a complete understanding of their internality is taking place is really quite something else indeed. The "villain" of the piece, in the immediate term of the novel's events, is not Hitler but a deranged attic dweller named Wolff who seems to be living in some mythological haze and it's hard not to see Hughes being incredibly allegorical in that sense. The destructive urges, no matter where they were directed by this character seemed to foreshadow what was to come (is to come for the novel's timeline) and the star-crossed aspects of Augustine's view of himself in relation to his German cousin is both touching for its youthful naivety, but also rather comical fun, in Hughes' style to put up some profound existential suffering as slightly opera bouffe.

But the turns of phrase that are situational so apt in reading Hughes don't tend to turn themselves into wonderful quotes. When in one passage, Hughes writes "Contemplating them, suddenly the thought struck him: 'Suppose you couldn't see?' -- and once again a pang of pity for Mitzi racked him like an angina." To know the characters, to feel that scene play out, "racked him like an angina" is very apt, but it's not something I'd pass along as a definitive example of some fine writing.

ON to book two and maybe a linked review, just to see in what fashion Hughes extends on to these characters and their futures.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most unsung masterpieces of XX th century fiction. Kind but smug, unaware of how grievously uneducated he is in spite of his Oxford degree, Augustine is a fabulously well-drawn antihero, who manages to spend several weeks under the same roof where one of Rathenau's killers is hiding without suspecting anything, even after the young man hangs himself and the police invade the castle. Of course, he is in love, or thinks he is, with a blind girl, never realising that that is his excuse for not paying any attention to the disturbing political events happening under his nose. The description of Hitler's failed 1923 putsch is breathtaking and many passages in this book gave me goosebumps. It is a great pity Hughes could't sustain his effort and failed to complete the ambitious saga of which this is the very auspicious first volume.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading The Fox in the Attic. Having studied German, and in particular Germany and the Germans between 1914 and 1950, I find the insight into the psychology of the German nation between the first two world wars fascinating. Often histories focus on events and national outcomes, and the people in leadership roles, but the human impact of war and national events is more obscure. This book is written in a tight prose that tells multiple stories at the same time. Broad in scope and deep in emotional content from many perspectives. Even in the tumults of historical upheaval human lives go on, immersed in the apparent trivia of daily life. It’s that trivia that binds the characters in stories and history to the context of history.

[Misha Herwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

1923 and Augustine goes to Germany to distance himself from an unfounded accusation. Staying with distant relatives he is oblivious to what is happening around him.
Telling the story of Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to topple the Weimar republic the underlying theme of this novel is an exploration of good and evil and in that respect it is only partially successful as the writer's intrusive philosophising breaks the flow of the narrative.
What I did like about the book is learning about a period of history and a way of life that I knew very little about.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am in two minds about this book - it has great narrative energy and some excellent moments both in the UK and in Germany, generally following the anti-hero Augustine, though he is more confused and undecided than anything else, but it also has some stuff that read as filler; the description of the Beer Hall Putsch is peerless though and I will try to find a copy of the sequel - the edition with the extra 12 chapters from the unwritten 3rd book

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written historical fiction about a young Englishman in Germany during Hitler's ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The prose is just fantastic, every intricate sentence polished till it gleams. The story is strange, full of allusions and wild imagery, maybe sometimes a little slow but compelling nonetheless. Such a pity that Hughes died before he could complete the final novel of his Human Predicament cycle, of which this is the first book. Another great find from NYRB!

[DilanAc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing. Yes, there was some philosophizing that I didn't totally understand. And my own paltry knowledge of Germany between the wars contributed to my confusion. But still a fully rendered depiction of a time and characters trying to inhabit that time. Definitely up for a re-read. I almost want to start it immediately.

[Marian Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my 2nd read from Hughes. "A High Wind in Jamaica" was the first one. Excellent stories. I enjoyed the historical bits about the time period especially on the intimacy of Hitler's background.

[Qylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an amazing story, and I ended up shouting at Augustine for not speaking up or pursuing Mitzi.

I was also so upset that the author had died before finishing the trilogy, that I haven't gone on to read the second novel...

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bottom line with this novel is that it is incomplete, only the first of the two volumes written/published for a proposed trilogy Hughes called The Human Predicament, which deals with English and German characters traversing the interregnum, concluding with the reality of a Second World War. Published in 1961, The Fox in the Attic was followed by volume two in 1973 (The Wooden Shepherdess), but upon Hughes’ death in 1976, only 50 pages or so of the concluding, unnamed volume were completed.

While I knew the trilogy was unfinished going into my reading of The Fox in the Attic, I didn’t realize how dependent the novel would be on its successors. The principal character at the novel’s opening in 1923 Wales is 23-year-old Augustine Penry-Herbert, a gentleman at loose ends, without professional, social, or marital prospects. Through Augustine, Hughes introduces his other characters—particularly his older sister (and her MP husband), and the German cousins, the Kessens—and these connections ramify and introduce more subsidiary characters, including Adolf Hitler, a consumptive Welsh vicar and his family, and a socially/politically ambitious German youth, Lothar Scheideman.

It’s evident that Hughes means to set out several different threads, English and German to describe and “explain” the temperament and the actions of the times, how England and Germany so soon after the “war to end all wars” meet again in bloody conflict. With the introduction of the first of Augustine’s cousins, the one-legged German officer, Otto von Kessen, Hughes begins to describe the mindset of post-war Germany; episodes with Otto’s brother Walther, Hitler, and Lothar exemplify other aspects of Germany’s discontent and ressentiment. Augustine himself is apolitical, even dim-witted about geopolitical matters, assuming all countries must practice or at least seek England’s liberal nonchalance.

The novel’s very title suggests a metaphor to describe the German psyche, or perhaps even the mindset of the global community, aware of and tolerant of intractable social/political forces that it will not/cannot bring into line. These glimmers of symbol, metonymy, and metaphor run throughout the book, and they largely surround Augustine’s affairs. At the novel’s opening, he carries away the corpse of a 5-year-old child he’s found in the marsh, reluctant to merely call the police and leave the corpse to be molested by rats. Through the longer period when Augustine is in Germany, he falls in love with his blind cousin Mitzi, who is all but unaware of him and his feelings. These particular events appear to lead nowhere, and their meaning is obscure, which I attribute to the fact that there will be echoes in the novel’s sequels.

Seventeen-year-old Mitzi’s blurry vision suddenly goes black during Augustine’s visit, and during the early days of her new total blindness, she hears a desperate wailing from the attic and she explores. Her brother Franz intervenes as she is about to discover the corpse of Franz’s friend, Wolff, who’d been hiding out as a war criminal in the attic and finally lost his mind and hanged himself. Hughes also describes how Hitler, shortly after the failed beer-hall putsch, is himself holed up in an attic before his discovery and arrest. And within the Kessen manor there is a semi-tame fox that roams the house. There are several threads in this novel—some literal, some with narrative purpose, some with symbolic import—but by the novel’s end, when Augustine has watched with incomprehension Mitzi’s willing confinement to a convent, they have not intertwined in any clear pattern.

As a stand-alone novel, The Fox in the Attic is a cryptic narrative, a story with many characters, events, and settings, but no clear ending or even an evident destination. It teases wonderfully, but it does not by itself satisfy.