Introduction

I had taken it for granted that at one time or another I would write a sequel to my novel,A Favourite of the Gods. The characters – dead or alive – invited further consequences of their actions, if not necessarily in a straightforward way. What these would be, healing? destructive? I was confident that I should know in time. Time, as it happened, lengthened into several years, hard-working, nomadic.

For different reasons in each case, I had come to take on a row of journalistic assignments; the most taxing of these had been two interminable trials, first reported by me on site, later written about at length. This, besides great emotional involvement, had entailed much travelling and long absences from whatever was home base.

One was the trial of Jack Ruby for the murder of President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas, Texas, in the spring of 1964. That trial was a mess – clownishly conducted, long-winded, hysterical, at moments grotesque. It dragged on day after day, week after week . . . For the spectators, the world press crammed into insufficient space, it was not merely tedious and exhausting, it devalued the awe and grief in which many of us had begun approaching our task.

Here is not the place to go into the prosecution of twenty-three men – plucked out after nearly two decades of anonymity or hiding, who had served as staff (innocent word) at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, tried by a – wholly exemplary – German court at Frankfurt in one hundred and eighty-three court days spread from the end of 1963 to the summer of 1965. What was revealed there, extracted,proved, step by patient legal step, the suffering at that camp (and other camps), of a degree and scale inconceivable to normal minds, is too immense.

Here, I am supposed to tell about the writing of a book which is a story about people and events belonging to a day-lit world. A world perhaps sustained by some illusions but also by not unjustifiable hopes. They were felt to be such by people who were allowed – thanks to chronology, geography and chance – to lead their lives not as the victims of deranged atrocities and war, but as individuals free (within the, always tricky, human condition) to shape their own achievements and misfortunes. I did want to write such a book again; I wanted to give another turn to the story of that favourite of the gods, but could not easily or quickly make the transition from giant misery to the subtleties, passions, pleasures and minor wickednesses of reprieved private lives.

Many novelists, from the greatest to the meretricious, have chosen to write about the vast dimensions, now tragic, now squalid, of human destiny in the mass. I have neither the talent nor the desire to write epic fiction. I can at the most imply. I am not a stranger, though, to the consciousness of ever-lurking horror – I was brought up with the rise of Fascism on our (Italian) doorsteps; moreover, I was born of partly Jewish descent, and in Germany which by a chain of coincidences I left  – while the Weimar Republic was still footling along – early and for good. This makes me an escapee, a survivor. And so would I be had I been born by another throw of the dice, like incalculable numbers of men and women in Russia, say, or China or parts of Africa. I do not forget it.

By the time I actually tackled this novel, it took on a shape different from the one it might have had if written sooner after the end of volume one. It became an offshoot rather than a continuation. The protagonists ofA Favouriteare indeed evoked; except one, the youngest, they are never as it were on stage.A Compass Erroris a juxtaposition of two tales: one, a new story, Flavia’s, faced alone with a new life and an onslaught of new people; the other a version, a compressed repetition, not a summary for ‘new readers begin here’, but rather, as painters allow themselves to do, the same subject taken in a different light and on another scale. It is a retelling by a seventeen-year-old girl of what she saw, heard and experience