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UK Authors - General fiction - |
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The Man in the Box |
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 The Man in the Box byThomas Moran Allison & Busby Publishers 287pages, April 2000 ISBN 0749004657 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A Hyde Dr Robert Weiss and young Niki Lukasser have a special bond. Niki was born with appendicitis, and if it weren’t for the doctor who was renting a room in the Lukasser’s small Austrian village, Niki would not be alive at all. Then the war comes and thirteen years later, Dr Weiss is a Jew on the run. The Lukassers repay their debt by hiding him in their hayloft in a place where nobody will find him - a wooden box just a metre wide, three metres high and four metres long. This is where he will live for the next two years. During this time Niki is growing up and suffering the usual pangs of adolescence with his best friend Sigi, a blind girl and of course their mentor, Dr Weiss. The Diary of Anne Frank meets Whistle Down the Wind. Moran treats the reader to an intimate delineation of the teenager’s world, a place of burgeoning sexual awareness, petty cruelties and a half-understood picture of the responsibilities of adulthood. All this is set against the backdrop of wartime Austria – rumors of concentration camps and other atrocities, and the casual brutalities of people who have been swept up in the Nazi dream. The Man in the Box is told in Niki’s own words, giving the story an immediacy that any amount of literary language would not have achieved. The extraordinary situation of Dr Weiss seems to be a mirror of those extraordinary times when average people were forced to find different ways of living to ensure their survival. I found this to be a most well-written and clearly realised novel. Moran is a promising author if he keeps up this high standard. |
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