The Assault by Harry Mulisch is a beautifully written book, starting with its lyrical prologue in which we are introduced to the quiet neighborhood of Anton Steenwijk’s childhood, a collection of four houses along a canal on the outskirts of Haarlem in the Netherlands.  We see the boats passing along the canal, ones that are pulled by a man walking on shore, ones that are propelled by long poles through the water, and sailing barges.  The motorboats, large and powerful, are different from the others for the wake they leave behind: “the waves bounced back and formed an inverted V, which interfered with the original V, reached the opposite shore transformed, and bounced back again — until all across the water a complicated braiding of ripples developed which went on changing for several minutes….Each time Anton tried to figure out exactly how this happened, but each time the pattern became so complex that he could no longer follow it.“  We don’t yet understand the importance of the ripples moving outwards from the action on the water but we will.  It is an analogy for the lasting and myriad impacts of war.

The story then begins in the backroom of the Steenwijk family home, just months before the end of World War II.  The family is still deep in the misery of occupation, deprivation, and fear. Shots ring out in the quiet of the night : a cruel collaborator has been murdered along the row of the four houses.  Reaction sets in and there is reprisal, the slaughter of an innocent family. It is just one in a countless number of World War II atrocities, yet it was unique, as each one was, for the people affected.  As the book unfolds, carefully and addictively (you cannot put this book down) we learn how many people were affected by the horror of that evening in Haarlem, the ripple affects of the murder spreading out across generations and classes and continents.  Each person holds a piece to the puzzle of why the night unfolded as it did but can the pieces be joined to make sense?

Anton does not want to solve the puzzle of that horrible evening, he shies away from the “whys” and the “what ifs”. The novel follows him as he grows older and distances himself from his night of terror — tries to forget the past and look only forward — but the past will not lie down dead.  It rises up again and again, turning Anton back towards the past and each time offering another piece of the puzzle: the collaborator himself; the neighbors who moved the body of the collaborator; the story behind the woman who shared a cell with Anton; the reason for the self-imposed isolation of another neighbor; and what the fourth neighbor saw. The picture becomes clearer and the insanity underlying it all is painfully realized: everything was just a reaction to another action, and so the dominoes fell.  It is as if the entire event were manipulated by different players of the game of war, moving pieces indiscriminately around the board, with no plan other than unstoppable response spurred by fear and hatred. The action that commenced the fall of dominoes was War. And the end of WWII was so close, just months away for the Netherlanders: what anguish to realize that the events of that one evening, with different twists of fate and time, could have never occurred at all.

There is no explanation that works for the horrors of War, and, Mulisch argues, there is no blame that is perfectly placed, either.  For what does the blame matter, what good does blame promote?  Always there are aggressors and there are reactions to the aggression, and the world continues on in its battles.  Anton reaches a point of despair that the ripples of War will never disappear:  “The world is hell…Even if we had heaven on earth tomorrow, it couldn’t be perfect because of all that’s happened.  Never again could things be set right.  Life on this planet was a failure, a big flop: better that it should never have begun.  Not until it ended, and with it every single memory of all those death throes, would the world return to order.”

The novel ends with Anton being swept up in an anti nuclear rally.  Will this be the final of all reactions, a nuclear assault with its corresponding nuclear response? Is such an end inevitable?  “Everything is forgotten in the end.” But maybe humans can remember — look backwards and move forwards — and stop the reaction of aggression and annihilation.    This powerful novel, a quiet but acute condemnation of war, is a place to start.  It is a great book.