The weight of history crashes through every scene of David Pryce-Jones’s newest novel, The Afternoon Sun.[1] The action takes place in the years between 1840 and the 1980s and stretches through Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, and England. Of the author’s many novels, some, like The Stranger’s View, have similarly wide historical peripheries, while others (The Sands of Summer, Quondam) are limited domestic dramas. What makes The Afternoon Sun problematic as a novel is the way the book’s scope has compelled the author to handle his characters’ fates as though they are the results of a search through archives.

The book opens with the story of a Jewish foundling, abandoned on a German roadside, who is given the name Gustav Ellingen and delivered to an orphanage in Nuremberg. At the age of ten or eleven the boy escapes with a friend, who runs toward what he imagines to be his home. In what the author calls “the version handed down from Gustav,” Ellingen recalls: “Not to be caught together, I chose the opposite direction. With my back to the afternoon sun.” The emphasis on history is apparent even in this moment of personal whimsy and is a habit throughout the book: the author comments, “Gustav Ellingen might have played his part in Bismarck’s Germany, or further to the west, in the France of Louis Napoleon and the Third Republic.” Instead, the child heads for Vienna and finds a room in a boardinghouse.