Book Review - The Rat by Gunter Grass

 The Rat by Gunter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim

London: Secker & Warburg, 1987 (first published in German in 1986)    ISBN 0436187728

It's been a very long time since I've read any of Gunter Grass's fiction - in fact it might even be about thirty years ago that I read in quick succession The Flounder and The Tin Drum, in that order. Having recently read the first volume of his memoirs, Peeling the Onion, I was motivated to pick up something else of his, and The Rat was to hand...

I must admit it took me some time to get in to this book - is it a dystopian novel about the end of the world? Is it a sci-fi fantasy of genetic mutation gone wrong? Is it an homage to the fairy tales of the German forest? Is it the rebirth of The Flounder and Oskar Matzerath? The answer is yes to all, with the landscape of Baltic Prussia and Danzig once again taking centre stage throughout the book.

The Rat is a vehicle for Grass to comment on environmental degradation, the arms race, the destruction of history and tradition in the chase for capitalist success and, as in many of his novels, a mourning for the loss of what once was - a Kashubian way of life that he knew as a child.

The book flits between multiple realities - the here-and-now, where Grass gets a pet rat for Christmas, and listens to the Third Programme on the radio while writing The Rat. He writes about Damroka, his beloved, who is on a ship running a scientific programme to measure jellyfish numbers in the Baltic: the ship is crewed with all the women Grass has been involved with romantically. He writes also about Oskar Matzerath, who is now a successful video producer - Grass discusses with him the production of a video about the death of the forests, and of the fraudster Malskat, while also reporting on his visit to Poland for his Grandmother's 107th birthday.

There are also the "other" realities... one where famous fairy tale characters try and take over the German government to stop the destruction of the environment, only to be destroyed by a combination of capital, military force and organised religion, and the other, where rats have organised the mutually assured destruction of the human race by atomic warfare, so they rule the world. There is a brief interregnum by human-rat hybrids (Manippels) that escaped from a laboratory, but the book ends with Grass, trapped in a spacecraft orbiting the human-less earth, being unable to decide if he was being dreamed by his interlocutor (the "she-rat"), or whether he was dreaming her. 

Depending on which reality we the reader are inhabiting at the time, the women on the ship might be speaking to The Flounder and trying to find the sunken city of Vineta, where women rule, and Oskar's shrivelled corpse is worshipped by the new rat society, that begins to develop in disturbingly similar ways to the human society it replaced.

Once the reader has oriented themselves to this book, it is a rollicking read, full of false bombast, and continually deflating the importance of all around us, poking the bear in a particularly Grassian way. Written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is perhaps a little dated in it's references, but none the worse for that. A good book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell