Shomer is always described in this novel as "in another time and place." His story is shorter, takes up less of the novel. He's a former writer of shund, pulp fiction in Yiddish. His time and place we know: Auschwitz, somewhere near the end of WWII. He's a prisoner there - is prisoner the right word? Victim, perhaps? In his mind, to try to avoid the horrors all around him, he tells a story - a detective story, an alternate-history story, a shocking pulp story.
The bulk of A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar's 2014 novel, is the story Shomer is telling himself - his revenge story, his distraction story, his lifeline.
It is 1939 London, November. The 1933 German elections swung the other way: the Communists took control, purged the National Socialists, aligned with the USSR. German refugees flooded London, and a nativist reaction to them has risen since then. Fascism, led by Oswald Mosley, is poised to take over the government in England, with an election coming by the end of the month. Mosely is expected to be the next Prime Minister.
Our main character is a private detective, one of those refugees, who was held in those post-election German camps but somehow escaped, an Austrian man in his middle years. He calls himself Wolf. He is who you suspect he might be. It isn't a secret, but the novel doesn't say the name - except once, very late.
Names have power, of course, as every SFF reader knows.
Wolf stumbles through a plot that's something like a parody of The Big Sleep and something of an excuse for Shomer to torment him and run through all of the sordid and scurrilous wartime rumors about "Wolf's" proclivities and sexuality.
(Tidhar does note, blandly, in his endnotes that the "one ball" rumor has no factual support. Wolf does seem to have the usual two throughout the book.)
Wolf's story is told mostly from his diary - though it's unlikely he would have time to write in such detail given the events depicted, and his zeal in capturing exact back-and-forth dialogue is both admirable and unbelievable - with some scenes narrated in third person, almost always after a diary section. The Shomer thread is also in third person, and is always introduced with that "in another time and place" line.
Wolf is hired by a rich woman - Jewish, which he loathes, of course - to find her sister, who was smuggled into England from Germany, but disappeared along the way. The organization that handles such smuggling is made up largely of Wolf's old compatriots, and parts of it operate mostly as advertised - delivering people where they expected to be, alive and poorer - and parts of it engage in the usual horrors of human trafficking. Wolf investigates that organization, talks to old friends, learns some things.
He's later also hired by Mosely, whom he thinks of with contempt but has eclipsed him comprehensively at this point. There's a Jewish terrorist organization that keeps trying to assassinate Mosely; they're getting closer. Mosely wants Wolf to find and stop them.
Wolf gets beat up, even more than most Chandleresque private detectives do. He rages and spews hate at random moments. He is sexually humiliated in ways that he secretly loves, in scenes that could limit the audience of this novel even more so than its Holocaust focus already does. He doesn't do much detecting, or show particular signs of being good at it. In the Chandler model, though, he does find that missing sister, though he never actually speaks to her or tells the older sister (or their father, who of course warns him off the case, through violence, about midway through the novel) where he found her.
Wolf takes on a fake identity, a very ironic one, and his story goes in an unusual direction at the end. The mystery-novel plot isn't wrapped up in any way; there are cops who he's embroiled with - there is also a serial killer of prostitutes, a young man obsessed with Wolf and killing them in ways to frame his idol, and so some of Wolf's beatings come at police hands - but they don't solve anything, either.
It ends like a literary novel: not like SF, not like a mystery, not even like noir. Wolf is...not transformed, I don't think, but perhaps I should say transported. And Shomer - well, we can say that Shomer is at peace, and we can argue about what happened to find him that peace.
This is definitely an audacious novel, with a sharp premise that generally works. Wolf sits uneasily in the Chandleresque tradition, though - he cannot be any kind of a knight or good man - which makes me think it would have been better-served with Mickey Spillane as a model. And a good part of the novel's appeal is to see Wolf humiliated, beaten, demolished - which, again, sits uneasily with his role as the hero of a detective novel. Perhaps the best thing I can say about A Man Lies Dreaming is that it shouldn't work, that it's too full of contradictions and elements that undercut it. And yet it does.
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