It is a strange brew indeed. German medic Paul Bauer arrives at Tolstoy’s former estate and falls in love with its communist custodian, the writer Katerina Trubetzkaya, over a shared enthusiasm for War and Peace. The fearless and idealised Katerina, who happens to speak perfect German, taunts the Nazis with sardonic comments and stock insults like ‘German swine’, which, rather implausibly, they tolerate.

Dialogue is not this novel’s strength, which is a shame as there is quite a bit of it. Putting aside a couple of witty one-liners – such as when Katerina tells Bauer that ‘in the whole of recorded history only two men, Hitler and Napoleon, have failed to realise that in winter Russia gets cold’ – the following passage is more or less representative:

A rap on the window made him start. ‘Hey, Bauer!’

Molineux. Bauer drew an arm across his helmet. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

‘Bah! You insomniacs are your own worst enemies.’

‘Go away.’

‘Exercise! You need exercise!’

‘For Christ’s sake, it’s raining.’

‘No longer. Listen.’

It was true, the rain had stopped.

For a novel marketed as ‘an exploration of the moral, emotional and intellectual limits that people reach in wartime’, this is risible stuff. But if you ignore the puff and read it as a blockbuster, skimming the dialogue, you can sit back and witness the slightly zany plot unfold. (And it does get zany. Later on, Tolstoy’s ‘ghost’ starts to transfix the other Germans, including a high-ranking Nazi officer who ends up causing problems for Bauer.)

The tone isn’t always right, either. Conte sometimes appears to be trying to write comedy, historical romance, and thriller all at once. Whereas black comedy of the Heller or Vonnegut variety is rooted in anger and absurdity – and a belief that sincerity alone could never convey the full magnitude of grief, injustice, and monotony in war – the humour in The Tolstoy Estate can be glib and ghoulish. In one chapter, for example, Bauer has to amputate the leg of a patient:

Bauer finished the cut and Pflieger picked up the severed limb, but instead of binning it straight away he held it up and, by slapping his spare hand against the amputated one, gave Hirsch a limp round of applause. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant, for your generous support. See, Sepp: I’m a genius.’

‘Put it down,’ Bauer ordered him. ‘Jokes, yes, but no maltreatment of body parts. That could be you lying there.’

Mercifully, there are a few high points, such as the first of two epistolary flash forwards, about halfway through, which outclasses the rest of the novel. Composed of two letters between Bauer and Katerina, they offer a glimpse of the kind of limber, aphoristic storytelling and genuine pathos the author can achieve when he ditches dialogue altogether.

Certainly, Conte is alive to the best in Tolstoy, and the speech becomes much less stilted when the main couple share their insights into War and Peace. Bauer talks of Tolstoy’s ‘capaciousness. The range of his curiosity, his empathy’; while Katerina notes that, ‘He’s not especially concerned with mellifluence. Flaubert would be in agony if he had to use the same word twice on one page, whereas if a word suits Tolstoy he’ll flog it to death.’

In his author’s note, Conte asserts that World War II is beginning to occupy a mythic, ‘Homeric’ space in the popular imagination, as Markus Zusak’s far more inventive Young Adult novel The Book Thief (2005), narrated by Death, would also suggest. And if we have enough distance to mythologise, we also would seem to have the distance to shatter old notions of bad taste; as seen in Taika Waititi’s irreverent film Jojo Rabbit (2019), a war comedy in which a German boy with Hitler as an imaginary friend discovers a young Jewish girl hiding in his mother’s attic.

Even so, The Tolstoy Estate’s themes demand a more careful tread, and by trading on Tolstoy without accessing the depth of life in his fiction, this book conjures a ‘ghost’ of its own – the literary novel it could have been.