They are about knowledge or, rather, about making sense of knowledge, of what is seen and heard (and read). In each case, the theme is embedded within a family relationship. The love felt for parents or grandparents is confronted with the unreliability, even untrustworthiness, of what they say or don’t say.So far, so good. Yet unfortunately, despite the dramatic historical and familial events the various characters face, the individual parts of The Dark Room are so dreadfully thin that they do not add up to anything significant. Perhaps this is because Seiffert is both afraid of making errors of fact (though there are a fair number) and all too aware of the pitfalls of traditional story-telling in this context.She pares down her prose to the point where it has no weight at all, but is merely indicative of a striving to present information. For example, in the first story, “Helmut”, she sums up the pre-Nazi years thus: “Life between wars is harsh: food plain, luxuries scarce, living space small.” Supposedly set in Berlin, there is in this story a complete absence of a feeling for place.

Furthermore, the thoughts of the central figure are so linguistically reduced that he can only come across as dim-witted.In the second story, a 12-year-old girl shepherds her younger siblings from southern Germany to a grandmother in Hamburg at the end of the war Their parents have been picked up by the Americans as Nazis. Seiffert, I suspect, has been impressed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay “Europe in Ruins”, translated into English some years ago. In it, Enzensberger compares the situation of Europe after the Second World War with the conditions produced by contemporary wars in the Third World.At any rate, Seiffert drains her narrative of details. These children and the difficulties they encounter – hunger, rapacious adults, trigger-happy soldiers, broken bridges – could be anywhere, in any war-torn country. So what new insight is being offered? And if there is so little sense of a specific time and place, what is the reader to make of the fragments of dialogue that gesture towards a context? “They’re Nazi children from the north,” remarks a farmer’s wife to her husband in a rather unbelievable snatch of conversation.

This doesn’t ring true – but nothing really does.The third story is set in the late 1990s. A young German teacher of English is presented as becoming obsessed with what his beloved grandfather, a member of an SS unit in Russia and subsequently a prisoner of war until 1956, may have done. This last story does have some glimmerings of interest, but by now, given the woodenness of the language and another principal character who appears dim beyond any belief, this reader’s patience had been too sorely tried to care much.There have, inevitably, been many bad books that have used Nazism simply as decor, and others that have tried seriously to grapple with the issues and failed. But, and I’m sorry to have to say this about a first novel by a young writer, I have never come across one quite as lifeless as this. Nothing is revealed.The reviewer is translator of ‘The Klemperer Diaries 1933-1945′ (Phoenix Press). She as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers. She did not foresee that she was soon to feel the crown’s dreadful weight,” wrote the Marquis de Ségur of Marie Antoinette in 1783

She as yet knew nothing of the crown but its flowers.