cover image In a Pig's Ear

In a Pig's Ear

Paul Bryers. Farrar Straus Giroux, $23 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-374-17564-1

Reveling in broad irony, English novelist Bryers (The Adultery Department) tweaks the horrors of the 20th century in this madcap novel, along the way fashioning a funhouse image of Arthurian legend. The tale is narrated by Milan Kubanicek (Milan being Merlin, he says, or rather ""the closest you can get to it in Czech""), a sardonic psychiatrist who relates the novel's odd doings to a pig--with whom he shares a prison cell after having been framed for the murder of a woman with whom he had fallen in love. The Arthur figure is Milan's friend, Hollywood director Adam Epstein, who was born in Berlin in the last days of the war. Adam's mother was a German pacifist doctor, and his fatherwas a Prussian aristocrat arrested in the 1944 officers' plot to assassinate Hitler. When he was two years old, Adam moved to California with his mother and his stepfather, a Jewish-American Army officer. Adam and Milan meet in Prague in 1967. Shortly thereafter, with Adam's help, Milan emigrates to L.A., where he becomes a psychotherapist to Hollywood stars. This odd couple travel to Germany in the early 1990s, where Adam, obsessed with his past and secretly worried that he may be the biological son of Joseph Goebbels, films an Arthurian romance and plans an autobiographical movie about his parents. In addition to Arthurian legends, Bryers liberally garnishes this full plate with fairy tales, Jungian imagery, Nazi history and film lore, creating a provocative phantasmagoria held together by the darkly funny voice of the worldly-wise Milan. (Oct.)