Intricate tapestry of ideas

AT 62, Justin Cartwright is a senior member of a masterful generation of English novelists that includes Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.

He has all that group’s relevant credentials -- a novel on the Booker shortlist, five nominations for the Whitbread Prize and an admiration for Saul Bellow and John Updike. Now -- with “The Song Before It Is Sung” -- he has something more: a quiet masterpiece. Cartwright has written that rare thing, a novel of ideas intricately and propulsively plotted, deeply humane, elegantly readable.

In his previous eight novels, Cartwright has proved himself an exquisitely astringent observer of middle-class lives and mores in contemporary England. Though set in this current moment, “The Song Before It Is Sung” is fixed upon a wider canvas -- the blood-drenched 20th century -- and draws its inspiration from the real and consequential relationship between the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, and the right-wing Prussian aristocrat and anti-Nazi, Adam von Trott zu Solz. (Cartwright’s title is drawn from a pointed question by one of Berlin’s favorite Russian thinkers, Alexander Herzen: “Where is the song before it is sung?”)

During the early 1930s, the real Berlin and Von Trott met and became friends at Oxford, which the handsome young German noble attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Their relationship suffered an irreparable breach in 1934, when Von Trott, by then working as a prosecutor in Germany, wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian denying that Jews were mistreated in his jurisdiction. His motives for that letter still are unclear. Some have argued that Von Trott acted out of a misplaced sense of Prussian duty; others that he was creating cover for his increasingly urgent anti-Nazi activities. Though he joined the Nazi Party, Von Trott did, in fact, use his diplomatic contacts to attempt to dissuade Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax from appeasement. During the war, he joined the right-wing anti-Nazi underground and took an active role in the plot that sent Catholic nobleman Claus Graf von Stauffenberg on an unsuccessful mission to assassinate Hitler. Von Trott was one of those arrested and hanged from a meat hook by a piano wire noose, their slow strangulation reportedly filmed for Hitler’s later enjoyment.

Berlin, a Latvian-born Jew, spent the war working for British intelligence in New York and Washington. He and his circle, justly regarded for their vast and sophisticated knowledge of Russia and Central Europe, discouraged the Allies from actively engaging with the anti-Hitler plotters, whom they judged suspect and quixotic.

Cartwright was inspired to create his story after seeing Nazi propaganda films of the plotters’ trials in Britain’s Imperial War Museum. His protagonist, Conrad Senior, is a once-promising 35-year-old academic turned journalist who has run through the advance for a book he never wrote and now is living on scraps of intellectual journalism. His relationship with his physician wife is disintegrating; she despises him as a slovenly failure and has begun a relationship with her boss, who she finds is a man of action and an altogether better human being.

Senior, however, has come into possession of 17 boxes of correspondence left to him by his old Oxford professor, Elya Mendel (Berlin) concerning the latter’s friendship with Axel von Gottberg (Von Trott). Mendel wishes his former student to turn the papers into a book but also something far more consequential than a mere history: a reconciliation and reckoning.

Mendel tells Senior that he has been chosen for a particular reason: “It is true that you were not my most brilliant student, but I think, my dear boy, that you are most human. You know that I took a position against Axel, and you know the reason why.”

Why does Mendel think the all-too-human Conrad is the appropriate explorer of those reasons? Perhaps because they are, on some deep level, so much alike. “The truth is,” Mendel explains, “Axel was a man of courage and action while I was a man who loved libraries and enjoyed gossip.”

Against all odds, Conrad rises splendidly to this challenge and begins to unravel a fascinating and complex network of friendships and love affairs -- particularly with two memorable English sisters -- shared by his subjects. His quest is driven by what becomes an obsession with recovering a lost film of Axel’s execution.

Along the way, there are compelling, often ravishing passages describing everything from Conrad’s ruminations to Oxford and Jerusalem before the war and East Prussia, site of Axel’s ancient family estate. The long narrative leading up to the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life is as gripping and altogether memorable a piece of narrative prose as you’re likely to encounter in the near future.

The real Isaiah Berlin was an exponent of pluralism, philosophical realism and an opponent of every sort of utopian idealism. Cartwright’s Mendel loathes what he calls “phoney-baloney spiritual tendencies.” The actual Adam von Trott zu Solz was an old-fashioned Prussian Junker (German noble), steeped in that rooted sense of soil, duty and tradition that was a hallmark of the traditionalist right wing that was a real force in Central Europe before Nazism swept it away. (A good part of its eclipse came from the fact that so many of its adherents mistakenly thought Hilter and his henchmen could be used and controlled.)

Cartwright has re-created something of this tension -- and allowed himself an interesting flirtation with Von Trott / Von Gottberg’s heroic idealism -- without diminishing the compelling force of Berlin / Mendel’s deeply humane argument. It’s all of a piece with the author’s approach to his work. As he recently said: “This stuff actually matters. It is important. Not that long ago, a very famous literary agent came to me suggesting I write a thriller under a pseudonym so as to make a heap of money. I was genuinely shocked, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been. I thought of someone like W.G. Sebald, whom I discovered far too late, who plugged away and produced the most astonishing material that changes the way you think. In the end I come down with Samuel Beckett that writing is not ‘about’ something, writing ‘is’ something. It is not a frivolous activity and it informs everything I do.”

That intense moral seriousness, joined with a remarkable and forceful style, makes “The Song Before It is Sung” a fine and memorable novel.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com