Will, by Jeroen Olyslaegers

I’d been meaning to read Will since I first saw it in 2020 – I liked the idea of a book set in Antwerp, a city I really enjoyed spending time in a few years back. Translated from the original Flemish, it’s an international bestseller and was a Times Historical Fiction Book of the Year in 2019.

It must have been a thin year.

It is told from the perspective of an elderly Wilfried Wils, looking back at his experience of Nazi occupation, a period when he worked as a police officer, pushed and pulled between collaboration and resistance, while his dangerous alter-ego, Angelo the expressionistic poet, is also looking on, waiting to reveal himself.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like Will, the narrator, and Angelo the poet just felt pretentious and a bit obvious. I didn’t like the narrator’s tone, the way that even though he was looking back he seemed to maintain an indifference towards the Nazis, more frustrated by their smashing up of a local pub than angered by the rounding up of Jewish families. Don’t get me wrong, there were sentences and maybe even paragraphs which described the horror, but there was no emotion, nothing which made me feel what a bystander must surely have been feeling. Perhaps that was the point. Maybe he didn’t feel anything, and a banal neutrality was the essence of his response, but that only makes me dislike him even more.

At the same time, he is angry about something. The way he describes his wife, Yvette, is not entirely pleasant. Frequent use of excreta as simile had me rolling my eyes, feeling puerile, lazy, and cheap. He frequently refers to his city as ‘a whore’ - in fact lots of things are referred to as ‘whores’ with ‘open legs’, and other than Hilde, his granddaughter, his attitude and use of language about women is pretty appalling. Even the people he helps, he doesn’t seem to care about – only Hilde seems to evoke an emotional response.

What most disturbed me is that the voice of this wannabe poet, written as a frankly unpoetic stream of consciousness, felt like the voice of an author with some things to get off his chest. We’re told in the blurb that the author’s grandfather was a collaborator, so perhaps this an investigation into the mind of his own bompa, an effort to understand what leads an ordinary man to casually participate in cruel acts while at the same time just trying to keep out of trouble. Unfortunately, it reads more like the words of a pub bore reminiscing about a war he was never in.

Maybe I missed something entirely, but I’m sad that it painted a very unpleasant portrait of a city I like. If anyone can recommend a good novel set in Antwerp, let me know – I need a palette cleanser.

- Paul

Paperback, £8.99. Find it in the Fiction section! 

... or don't!