Sinking Ship THE RAT by Gunter Grass

By Paul Gray

Ever since his first novel, The Tin Drum, exploded into international bestsellerdom in 1963, Gunter Grass has pursued two parallel careers. He continued to write fiction (Dog Years, Local Anaesthetic, The Flounder), as well as plays and poetry, that enhanced his worldwide reputation. He also plunged energetically into politics, working on behalf of West Germany's Social Democratic Party, speaking out against the superpower arms race, and hectoring with particular fervor the Western democracies. Planners of literary conferences learned that one sure way to garner attention was to snare Grass as a participant. He could, at the very least, be counted on to insult his hosts and stir everyone up before he moved on.

No one can doubt the author's devotion to both literature and crusades, but Grass, 59, seems to be growing impatient with keeping the two activities separate. Witness The Rat, a novel in which imaginative extravagance is yoked to a relentless jeremiad about the despoliation of the earth. The result is a struggle between an art that teases and an argument that harangues. The loser, hands down, is art.

The narrator is explicitly Grass himself. He alludes to his birth and childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk), his service as a Hitler Cub during his early adolescence, and his later authorial relations to one Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked, stunted hero of The Tin Drum. Having asked for and received a pet rat as a Christmas present, the speaker begins suffering nightmares in which he must endure diatribes by "the She-rat of my dreams." She complains of, among many other things, the beastly treatment the rat has had to suffer at the hands of humans, dating all the way back to its exclusion from Noah's ark. She also reveals that people have finally succeeded in destroying themselves and their civilizations, and that rats are the inheritors of the devastation left behind. She acknowledges her kind's proverbial reputation for abandoning sinking ships, but adds, "When Earth became the ship there was no other planet to move to."

This news spurs the narrator first into denial ("No, She-rat, no! . . . We're still alive and kicking") and then into a frenzy of storytelling ("an attempt to put off the end with words"). He resuscitates Oskar of The Tin Drum, now nearing 60 and the head of a film and videocassette production company, and sends him on a trip to Poland to attend his grandmother's 107th birthday party. He revives the plot and premise of The Flounder and sets five women in charge of a sailing barge on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly testing for the stultification of that body of water by jellyfish pollution but really looking for the underwater feminist city of Vineta. Then there is the matter of acid rain and the death of European forests. That calls for a recurring fantasy involving the Grimm brothers, a host of their fairy- tale characters and the children of a West German Chancellor. Overpopulation is not ignored, nor is the danger posed by nuclear power plants, armaments and the Big Bang.

Whenever these diversionary tales threaten to get interesting, the She-rat interrupts with further animadversions against Homo sapiens. The narrator complains, "Her talk, that nasal piping, grumbling, muttering, went on and on." Indeed it does, drowning everything, including patience, in a sea of recrimination and invective. The preachiness of The Rat ultimately grows fatiguing and self-negating. If the human race is truly as pigheaded and suicidal as it is portrayed here, then such a book will only add to the "garbage mountain" from which the She-rat speaks her eulogy. -- P.G.