Joshua Malbin

The best thing about The Listener is its art. I’m not exactly sure how writer/artist David Lester achieved its effect, maybe some combination of pen for outlines and brush for the smeary shading? In any case, the pages all look like the rough studies a serious artist might draw when preparing a painting or a sculpture, and that fits perfectly with the framing story, which follows an artist making such drawings.

The story contained within that frame is also fairly compelling: an account of an election in the tiny German state of Lippe that saved the Nazi Party in 1932 when it appeared its popularity was about to collapse. That story is nominally told by a couple who had supported a competing right-wing party in Lippe and felt betrayed when their party leader struck a deal with Hitler, but it doesn’t delve into them terribly deeply as individuals. I’m okay with that because Nazi history carries inherent drama.

The hangup, for me, came only with the framing tale. (I say “framing tale,” but it gets as much attention and as many pages as the story it contains.) It focuses, as I mentioned, on an artist, a political sculptor named Louise. At the beginning of the book there’s a death: a man falls from a height while trying to hang a banner. For most of the book I assumed that man was Louise’s boyfriend, but in fact it turns out he was a stranger inspired by her art. Following the death she leaves Vancouver and travels around Europe, looking at and discussing art. She also listens to the old German couple’s story.

There’s a really compelling idea in all this struggling to get out, I think. The Listener wants to be about how history isn’t foreordained, that individual acts of protest, even artistic ones, can make a real difference. I believe that’s the purpose of focusing so much attention on an election in a small state early in Hitler’s rise to power, when he still might have been derailed. Another character in the story offers the parallel to Orson Welles, who always regretted not running for the Senate in Wisconsin when he might have beaten Joseph McCarthy before McCarthy’s first term.

Unfortunately, that message is undermined because I simply can’t get invested enough in Louise. Her motivations are frustratingly vague; I never really understand why she feels so responsible for this stranger’s death nor what she’s seeking in Europe. None of the conversations she has in Europe even touch on that, not even when she takes a lover. They’re mostly abstract discussions about art and responsibility, and while it’s possible to connect those to her feelings, it’d be much more powerful and engaging if she made those connections herself. I want her to be a striver, not just a listener.

Her passivity, and the passivity of the couple in the frame tale, together leave Hitler himself as The Listener‘s most dynamic, compelling figure. I really don’t think that’s what David Lester intended.

The Listener comes out this Friday, April 15. Check out preview pages here and see what you think.

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