The book divides into two parts. The first, titled ‘The Affair,’ offers a careful narrative of that life: the early career, the cakewalk from prize to prize, the literary celebration, the political controversy, the exposure, the swift and violent death-by-media. The narrative is, as we might expect with such a subject, gripping. It is also a model of its kind. While many of the actors might not relish seeing their actions and statements set out so starkly, I think they will acknowledge the accuracy of the account. It is in the second part, titled ‘The Argument,’ that Manne moves into analytic mode. He assesses The Hand first as fiction, then as history, to conclude with an essay on ‘Free Speech, Political Correctness and the Jews’. While being in his terminology an old academic lefty, I have always admired Manne for his unfashionable virtue of determined reasonableness and his ravishingly cool analyses. His performance here increases my admiration. The coolness is gone, but the rationality is strenuously present. He records in his Prologue that when he read the novel, in the afterglow of the Miles Franklin award, he judged it ‘morally and historically shallow, coarse and cold, even technically quite incompetent’. What he found ‘puzzling, dismaying and disorienting’ was that others whose judgement he had respected had read the book quite differently, and applauded it vigorously. Nothing happened during the ensuing weeks to reduce his dismay, and a great deal to augment it. If the awarding of the prize was ‘a weird but nonetheless significant cultural accident’, as he calls it, it was an accident of the slow-motion-multiple-car-pile-up variety, with a deal of damage, not all of it evident, being sustained by all parties. At its end ‘those who were repelled by The Hand claimed that their opponents were ignorant history, insensitive to racism, anti-Semitism, even the meaning of the Holocaust. Those who supported The Hand, or who were merely repelled by the attacks upon it, thought their opponents insensitive to fiction, culturally censorious, overbearing, political correct.’

Given that these matters seem to demand an explicit nailing-of-colours, let me confess that when I first read The Hand (already under heavy criticism) I thought it a bad novel: that an ignorant and immature writer, whose prose was at times almost comically flat, had bitten off very much more than she could chew. Nonetheless, I was impressed by her courage in tackling a supremely daunting subject. Having read reasonably widely in Holocaust material, I knew something of the activities of the Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers recruited by the SS to assist in the mass killings in Poland, but next to nothing of what had happened in their home states, and I was touched by her ambition to show her readers something of the social and interior lives of the perpetrators of those most deliberate and atrocious crimes.

But Manne, whom I respect, had thought differently (at that point I had not read his analysis). So I read The Hand again – and was delivered a chastening lesson regarding the windy latitudes of ‘reader-response,’ or, less grandly, about indulgent reading. A few passages I had simply misread. Throughout I had mentally edited, ‘compensating’ for the writer’s youth, her ignorance, the vulgarity of her prose; obligingly supplying both the affect, and the moral and the historical context. I had simply assumed her moral earnestness. I still did not judge the book to be consciously anti-Semitic: more chillingly, Demidenko’s Jews were simply sidelined, established as chronic outsiders. No one reading The Hand would guess that there had been close to a million Jews in the Ukraine, that Jews had lived there for centuries under the shadow of a murderous anti-Semitism. And Demidenko had indeed reduced the Holocaust to a largely off-stage episode within an ongoing feud between Jews and ‘Ukrainians’. This time the clichés marched across the page with the grim simplicity of a Ukrainian Nationalist nursery tale. This time I read the book that Robert Manne had read.

In the few deeply felt (and beautifully written) pages which provide the pivot from narrative to analysis, Manne tells us that with the jubilant celebration and vehement defence of a book he found repellent came ‘a strange sense of cultural destabilisation’ in a country where he had thought he had found a home. That we each read books differently is one of the few incontestable truths in this uncertain world. That different readings of this particular book could so unsettle a tough, confident and informed sensibility demands rethinking of that easy truth. He has also persuaded me that my lazy assent to the notion that art and actuality, art and morality, should be kept asunder has been too casually given, and that each case must be argued individually. He reminds us of an important fact lost in the general din: that forceful, even ferocious criticism is the guardian, not the enemy, of free speech. And he draws an essential distinction, between ‘the language of the heart’ – passion, dismay, outrage – which may be ‘the precisely appropriate tonal register at certain moments in certain kinds of discussion,’ from ‘the lan­guage of the spleen’ – invective, slander and slur – which never is. The Culture of Forgetting is written in the language of the heart: informed, reasoned, immaculately argued, profoundly impassioned.

Manne wrote his book to diagnose, perhaps to exorcise, a chilling sense of disorientation. At its close he remains deeply perturbed. The Holocaust is for him ‘a central fact’ not only of this century but of human history. He believes that the Demidenko controversy, which began innocently, in ‘provincial liberal naivety, historical ignorance and sentimental multiculturalism,’ came to reveal that many of his fellow intellectuals do not share that belief, and he grieves for what that might imply about the level of political and historical understanding and of moral poise in this culture. Therefore The Culture of Forgetting. But while Manne has devoted much of his life to the study of the Holocaust, most of us who also recognise it as a great fact of history have not. We ‘remember,’ but we do so by way of a few key icons – a cluster of photographs; a hand­ful of homely words, like ‘chimney’, ‘hair’, ‘oven’, now forever tainted; a few place­names, like’ Auschwitz’, ‘Dachau’, which can never be mere place-names again. But our generation is ageing now, and those events fifty years gone. For those younger there have been too many villains, too many victims, and far too many images of atrocity for any to be evaluated and elevated to iconic status. Perhaps not so much the ‘Culture of Forgetting,’ then, as the Culture of Exhausted Ignorance. To illuminate that ignorance on central matters, to enliven that exhaustion into moral perception, we need books precisely like the one that Robert Manne has written.