Only Breath & Shadow

by Andrew Tweeddale

Rating: *****

Badly scarred and blinded in WWI, aristocratic Englishman Christian Drewe now lives an ordered life in Vienna, attended by his staunchly loyal housekeeper, Frau Huber. 

However, his routine existence is thrown into turmoil when he meets American nightclub singer Claire Astor, and even more so when the Nazis occupy Vienna and his Jewish friends, the Friedmanns, are arrested, leaving their four children hiding in Christian’s flat. Frau Huber, Claire, and Christian know they must arrange the children’s escape from Vienna, but they need to outsmart the Gestapo, who are tracking their every move, if they have any chance of survival.

Only Breath & Shadow is the concluding novel in Tweeddale’s Castle Drogo series, however, it completely stands alone.  Opening in late July 1934 and spanning five years, it’s a beautifully involving, moving, and layered novel that showcases the very best and worst of human behavior.

Tweeddale has smoothly blended his fictional story involving the Friedmann children and others with the factual narrative of Gil and Eleanor Kraus’s rescue of fifty Jewish children. Tweeddale also includes the additional non-fictional character of Paul O’Montis, a gay, Jewish cabaret artist, and his subsequent persecution.

Tweeddale’s portrayal of Christian is masterful. From the opening chapter, the reader is effortlessly drawn into the blind protagonist’s navigation of the world around him and his internal responses.

Tweeddale conjures the immediate sensory experience of a place, with its tactile quirks, olfactory essences, and auditory signatures, providing magically lovely descriptions that engage not only Christian’s senses but the reader’s as well.

Despite Christian's struggle to avoid being defined by his blindness, Tweeddale ensures that it does not entirely characterize him. Emotionally damaged to the point of paralysis, a state that is touchingly depicted, he is also a charismatic figure, sharply intellectual, arrestingly attractive, and unswervingly principled. The irony of the sightless man possessing more vision than those who can see is a powerful message, and Tweeddale conveys it with nuance.

There are a couple of engrossing and poignant sidelines. 1930s Viennese café culture, before the 1938 Anschluss, is brought to heady, intoxicating life through Christian’s great friend, Tomas Skeres, whose whereabouts become unwittingly pivotal toward the end of the novel, and through Paul O’Montis.

Additionally, the uncertain, intermittent nature of the relationship between Christian and Claire simmers underneath the action, marked by gentle flashes of romantic tension and sexual frustration.

Nonetheless, Claire occasionally fails to convince, unable to shake a slight opportunistic slant in her personality despite her selfless behavior toward the Friedmann children.

The children’s fate is the driving arc of the novel, and in spite of the Krauses’ involvement, Tweeddale does not grant the Friedmann children the obvious outcome. With the children sheltered in Christian’s apartment and Vienna now shrouded in the dark horror of the Nazi regime, Only Breath & Shadow becomes a gripping game of cat and mouse between Christian and Sturmbannführer Ernst Schmidt, whose ability to suppress nastiness while keeping it apparent is chilling.

Tweeddale maintains a nicely judged pace through short chapters and differing points of view. However, the tempo becomes blistering as the conclusion draws near, the latter arriving in a rush of violence that is both shocking and heartbreaking in its futility.

Only Breath & Shadow is a moving novel, deeply researched and compulsively readable. Tweeddale’s fine, sophisticated prose is poised and intelligent, much like his main protagonist, and both capture the reader from the very beginning. Highly recommended.

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