ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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GIVEN the current political climate, it’s easy to empathise with Oskar. On his third birthday, he decides to stop growing in protest against the world.
But that antipathy for human greed and folly starts early. Even before his umbilical cord has been cut, the narrator of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum pleads to be returned to the amniotic sac after Alfred — one of two “presumptive fathers” — sketches out his future as a greengrocer.
Set against a turbulent period in Europe’s history, starting with the conception of his mother Agnes in 1899 and taking in the rise of nazism — here renamed unspecifically as the Order — and Kristallnacht.
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