Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann review a romp through the thirty years war

The hero of Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel is based on a character from German folklore, a subversive prankster who challenges the social order with filthy slapstick and fart jokes, like an X-rated Robin Hood. Tyll Ulenspiegel first crops up in a German jokebook – the gratifyingly evocative German word is Schwankbuch – from the early 16th century. Kehlmann, who found fame with another historical novel, 2006’s Measuring the World, transplants his hero to the gritty context of the thirty years’ war, which I now know lasted from 1618 to 1648.

I’m ashamed to admit that before I began this book I knew less about this conflict, which shaped modern Europe and cost millions of lives, than I did about the bloody but fictional struggles that tear Westeros apart in Game of Thrones. However, it demonstrates that it’s possible to read Tyll with pleasure while knowing next to nothing about the history. This is because it first of all succeeds as a rip-roaring yarn – one of the reasons it’s being turned into a Netflix series. The book recounts Tyll’s life from his childhood in a tiny village to his ascent to the 17th-century equivalent of showbusiness celebrity as a court jester. Along the way, he flees witch-hunters, finds himself in a collapsed mine outside a besieged city, entertains the inhabitants of a doomed hamlet and performs for royalty.

Tyll is an entertainer – a juggler, an acrobat and a jester – whose brilliance is born of hard practice. In a similar way, this book artfully conceals its own sophistication. Kehlmann tells the story non-chronologically. It begins with the adult Tyll, then flashes back to his childhood. It then cuts between a series of interlocking scenes that take place at different points in Tyll’s career, one at the siege of Brno, another at the court of the Holy Roman emperor, several with Tyll as court jester to the exiled king and queen of Bohemia.

It’s only on careful inspection that you see how cunningly each episode fits with the others. Kehlmann will dramatise the same events from different viewpoints, giving us slightly different information each time, and showing how memory and self-interest obscure the truth of history. He also toys with sly literary allusions. At the end of the episode with the king of Bohemia, Tyll and the sick king end up separated from the royal retainers and lost in a snowstorm. As he sinks into a coma, the king finds his mind wandering to the theatrical performances that his wife loves: “A king without a country in a storm, alone with his fool – something like this would never happen in a play. It was too absurd.” Tyll is historical fiction, but its strangeness and energy give it the flavour of a speculative or post-apocalyptic novel. It reminded me a bit of Hard to Be a God, the Soviet science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers about scientists observing life on a barbarically violent planet. Tyll accomplishes something like this experiment: it plunges a modern reader into an astonishingly violent and dirty alternative reality.

Kehlmann renders this world with an extraordinarily delicate and vivid touch, fixing on just those details that seem to capture the differences from our own: almost ubiquitous hunger, superstition and the oppressive beauty of nature. Above all, he shows the pain of attachment in a world where war, disease and starvation make existence so tenuous. “No one will ever know about you,” a mother says to her stillborn child. “No one will remember, only I, your mother, and I won’t forget, because I must not forget.”

But Tyll is a very funny novel, too, with a Monty Pythonesque fascination for absurd hierarchies, court protocol and the status games played by egotistical participants at peace conferences. There’s also a strand of unsettling black humour in its depiction of witch-hunters torturing confessions out of suspected warlocks in backwoods villages.

In this bleak world, the figure of Tyll himself is a tonic both to the audiences he entertains and to the reader. He stands at an angle to his era: in it, but never fully of it, looking at everything with a beady, mocking eye, like an avatar for a sceptical modern sensibility. And whereas the Tyll of the original German chapbooks is a one-dimensional provocateur, in the novel he becomes a fully realised character whose ability to see through the cant of his era has been bought at terrible personal cost.

The book also stealthily and elegantly feeds you just enough exposition to whet your curiosity about the historical figures and events it depicts. I was inspired to cross-check some of its more absurd-sounding facts. And indeed, Athanasius Kircher, who helps put Tyll’s father on trial for witchcraft, was a real person who came up with the idea of the Katzenklavier, a musical instrument that generated sound by torturing live cats.

It’s a testament to Kehlmann’s immense talent that he has succeeded in writing a powerful and accessible book about a historical period that is so complicated and poorly understood. He never pushes the parallels between present and past, but there are many ways in which this strife-torn Europe, fractured by religion, intolerance and war, is a reflection of our own times.

Marcel Theroux’s The Secret Books is published by Faber. Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, is published by Riverrun (RRP £18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.

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