14 September 2009 - James Hogg's review of Scars Beneath the Skin: “A whole remembered world reappeared”

"There was no drama to the sound, it was a very simple sound – a single bass note with a sharp beginning, a sharp end and no echo. Innocuous, almost."

No matter how hard I try to convince myself that the most significant historical event of my lifetime is wrapped up in the name 'Mandela' or 'Obama', it’s still the numbers 9/11 that always win out in the end.

In books, movies, art since, I've often thought that that day's events seem shoe-horned in for effect, for a kind of cheap impact. Spike Lee's film 25th Hour is one, Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions another. Scars Beneath the Skin, thankfully, is an altogether different prospect.

Author AJ Duggan began writing after being caught up in the Manchester bombing in 1996. In his novel, East Berliner Karl Dresner undertakes a similar journey: five years after narrowly escaping a terrorist attack in London, he watches with the world as the Twin Towers fall.

Dresner's scars see him descend into alcoholism, insomnia and road rage, an anaesthetised half-life dependent on the flick of a coin. Caught up in the static of a "radio dial rested between two stations", his is a world of spectral timeshifts and unmarked borders, of airport waiting areas and motorway service stations, of over-stretched friendships and soulless fact-finding evenings at work. Then in a moment of blind anger he saves the life of Lucia Cavallieri.

At first, she's everything he hates: she's pushy, her nails match her phone, and she works in marketing. What results is a striking testament to the power of writing as a project of remembrance and rehabilitation, a modern love story that taps into the darker side of regenerative romance, as hypnotic as it is haunting.

I particularly enjoyed the transplanted setting of modern Germany, a country itself in constant struggle with its collective past: the Hindenburg; Dachau; the Wall. Much of the narrative takes place in Munich, birthplace of Nazi terror, a city that endured its own One Day in September in the Olympic year of 1972. Yet what is most captivating about Scars is its avoidance of the sensational; its theme of history repeating flows in and out like a current, beautifully wrought and shot through with sparks of warmth and wry humour.

The epigraph to Scars comes from Albert Camus: "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." The idea of enlargement through diminution, of finding enlightenment in dark times, is as old as literature itself, a perennial theme from King Lear's Dover Cliff to Fight Club's Project Mayhem. In capturing the fear, paranoia and hope of the post-9/11 world, Scars belongs up there with the best of them.