Transmission 6:
Prussian Snowdrops by Marion Arnott
Prussian Snowdrops by Marion Arnott
Read by the author
From Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo, November 2000
Podcast Length: 87 minutes • Transmission Length: 79 minutes
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Welcome to Transmissions From Beyond, the biweekly podcast of stories selected from the pages of the TTA Press magazines Interzone (science fiction & fantasy), Black Static (horror) and Crimewave (crime & mystery) by editor Pete Bullock. New stories appear every other Monday. Videocasts are not on a set schedule.
October 16th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Have to say I didn’t like this one much - any fans of this that can say why they did?
November 12th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
This was one of the most powerful stories I can remember listening to. I’m a bit of a hard bastard, but this literally made me cry. I’ve been impressed by Arnott’s work before, but this was something else. (I’m also not a regular reader of Crimewave. I think I probably should be.)
So, what impressed me about this story? Apart from the fact that it is true (at least in the sense that the kinds of events described herein happened, rather than being invented or fantastic) the story was written in such a way as to bring the characters to life. They were flawed. They were human. No one was really a monster–not even the schoolmaster; he was just petty and self-important and desperate for attention. And so many characters could easily have been idealized or made into clichés: the cynical journalist who writes essays supporting the Nazi party for an easy life; the heroic and idealistic reporter back in Berlin; the noble but retarded old woman; the self-sacrificing doctor; the evil villagers and brownshirts. But the cynical writer is too much like ourselves for us to damn him: can we swear we would do any better in his shoes? The heroic journalist and self-sacrificing doctor both make terrible, stupid mistakes that we see coming a mile off, so it’s hard to idealize them. Traudl is too grumpy and irascible to be the noble savage we’d like to admire.
Although one could argue this story was slow (and it took me a long time to find a slot in which to listen to this 90-minute podcast), the scene-setting was both invaluable and deftly done. Early conversations with the schoolmaster were chillingly ironic–in that we can see what trouble the young writer is getting himself into while he can’t. The mystery of what secret Traudl is keeping is genuinely gripping and puzzling up until the very end–even to one like myself who knew already what Aktion T4 was all about. In short, I liked almost everything about it. Except that it made me cry, and I don’t cry. Dammit.