The Radetzky March (Everyman's Library) Book

When my children were very little, one of their favourite games involved sitting on the foam-filled back of the family sofa pretending to be on horseback. They'd perch in a row, one leg on each side and bounce up and down to the rhythm of what they called 'the horsey music'. Whenever I hear The Radetzky March by Johann Strauss, that gorgeous memory comes back in a flash!

My kids were right. That nineteenth century military tune is definitely 'horsey' music! Listen to it yourself You can hear the high stepping cavalry launching from a trot to a gallop, hooves thundering, nostrils snorting, then wheeling around to gallop back to the starting point before beginning all over again. And you can hear foot soldiers too, standing to attention, clipping their heels, marching forward, swords jangling, sabres rattling, marching, marching, marching.

But for all that it is full of of the crashing and booming, the clanging and banging, the ringing and jingling of the battle field, it is uplifting music too. You smile, though you are anti-war, you clap your hands and tap your feet, though you think boys should never be sacrificed to meaningless causes.

As I read Joseph Roth's book, I reacted as I react to the Strauss music, uplifted by the spirit of it but downcast by the waste of lives in the service of a monstrous military machine. And Roth's tone throughout the book seems equally ambivalent. He holds the military machine that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire in fierce affection, but at the same time he is absolutely in favour of the ending of the tight control of peoples' minds and lives that such empires were built upon. His nostalgia battles with his humanity, and we hear the sound of that battle right through the book. Rainstorms thunder, train carriages smash and crash against each other, bells peal, bugles blare, the drumbeats of the Radetsky March boom out at regular intervals. And all the while, innumerable clocks count the story down towards the Serbian gunman whose ringing shot will mark the ending of an era.

As I turned the pages, I was reminded of the title of a book I read some years ago, coincidently by an author whose later books I've been reading recently: Julian Barnes. The Sense of an Ending begins with a reference to that same Serbian gunman, and I kept thinking that Barnes' title encapsulates Roth's book perfectly; there is the sense of an ending right from the beginning. Roth never allows us to forget that the book is about 'ending', the ending of a way of thinking, the ending of a way of living, and the ending of millions of lives in a meaningless war.

That Roth conveys all of that while simultaneously offering the reader exuberance, uplifted feelings, and enormous hope in humanity, is the achievement of this incredible book.
I'm very glad to have finally discovered Joseph Roth