The Informers

Like WG Sebald's Austerlitz, The Informers peels back layers of time to expose the secrets of the past. Although set in South America, far from the birthplace of Nazism, it reminds us that National Socialism's insidious tentacles stretched far across the Atlantic to blight the lives of those who had travelled great distances to escape them.

The novel's narrator, Gabriel Santoro, is a writer. He has the same name as his father, a respected but spiky professor of rhetoric. When Gabriel junior publishes a work of non-fiction about Sara Guterman, a close family friend who emigrated with her Jewish parents from Germany to Colombia in 1938, his father takes the uncharacteristic and provocative step of condemning the book in a vicious review.

The ensuing rift between them lasts for three years until the day Gabriel receives a phone call from his father, telling him that he has to undergo surgery immediately to unblock a coronary artery. The months following the operation profoundly affect the older man: 'he confirmed the feeling I'd had earlier: one of the consequences of the second life was a brutal nostalgia, the notion, so very democratic, so universally accessible and, at the same time so surprising, of time lost, even though we might have suffered more in that time than in the present.'

The process of recuperation has several other outcomes. Father and son communicate once more, aided by Sara Guterman's benign presence; and Gabriel senior begins a relationship with his physiotherapist, who he persuades to join him on a journey to a Colombian city far from Bogotá. Gabriel has a hidden agenda in making this trip - to atone for a wrong committed many years before. It is a journey from which he will not return.

Vásquez's novel tackles big issues, not least the importance of language. Gabriel writes for a living, his father uses words to precise and devastating effect in speeches and lectures. This is reflected in the narrator's crisp use of language, which is beautifully translated by Anne McLean.

On another level, Vásquez is eloquent about the way in which exiles are unable to relax into new lives if they don't know the language of  their adopted country. A friend of Sara's father is described thus: 'He had been forbidden spontaneity, Margarita said, the capacity to react unthinkingly, to make a joke or ironic remark, all the things that people who live in their own language can do.'

Vásquez  also shines a spotlight on the plight of these innocent German exiles during and after the war, many of whom were stripped of their possessions, their businesses and their respectability in spite of doing all they could to integrate into Colombian society. (He is careful to point out that plenty of expatriates were in fact Nazi sympathisers.) A culture of informing on neighbours and friends, which was to last for years, destroying lives forever and leaving a grim legacy for future generations to sift through.

This in turns leads to fundamental questions about how far we should dig into the past. Does everything need to be told? How much do we have a right to know? Should some secrets die intact and unrevealed with their owners? Our culture today is obsessed with knowing all the facts, but can we ever know everything? And if so, is this even desirable? For Gabriel, the modern writer-journalist, the answer to these questions is an unequivocal 'yes', no matter what he might unearth, but Sara is less sure:

'If we were alone in the world, you and I, in this house, if a bomb had fallen and Colombia no longer existed and only we existed, and you asked me what went on, I could tell you everything … Later you'd be sorry you knew. One gets contaminated by this kind of knowledge, Gabriel; I don't know how better to tell you, but that's how it is.'