And the Rat Laughed

I have made several attempts to write a review of this very interesting story. Interesting? Story? Are they the right words for a read on that most emotive of subjects, the Holocaust? I have read far too much about that subject and had been burnt out by it to be honest. Mankind's inhumanity to each other never ceases to amaze. At this point in my life I look for peaceful reading but seemingly fail. Peaceful? Do I read for peace? For pleasure? The challenge of the subject? As I finished the amazing final chapter, I began questioning why I read, let alone question the inhumanity of mankind and its ability to remember and to forget. Why read of this subject? To remember?

And that is what to me makes this conceptually outstanding. In terms of the thematic use of religion, memory and cumulative error, I am very vaguely reminded of A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr, a religious tale of cumulative error. The Goodreads blurb calls And The Rat Laughed “a unique book” and I do tend to agree. The Science Fiction element is that part that makes this as unique as anything I recall reading in terms of Holocaust fiction.

But reader beware, And the Rat Laughed takes very careful reading. There are five chapters, and I had myself rereading the first two, such was their importance to the Sci Fi element that came later. Even then, I knew that I had missed references to both the past and the future. The absolutely sublime last chapter has had me knowing that I will read And The Rat Laughed again.

The following quotes are passages from the first chapter, a chapter that tells the story of an ageing Grandmother as she tries to recall her horrific childhood to her school age granddaughter, who is required to talk to a holocaust survivor for a school project.
“...It's not one of those stories that audiences love.”
As to the grandmother, “As far as she's concerned, the story isn't that important to her, and at this late date it doesn't seem to be important to anyone else either. There are many others like this story, including some that have already been told. She doesn't think that hers is any more worthy. On the contrary, she's convinced that the story will resist her, will become incoherent, and in an effort to disguise its own ugliness will turn into something completely different. And yet, she is the only one who can tell it. If not all of it or most of it, then at least some parts. A strange sense of urgency overtakes her. Maybe it's old age. She cannot afford to let the story disappear as if it never happened.”
“Because once she lets go of it, it will be told differently. People will add things, leave things out, twist it out of shape. And all she has to go by is her own version, her own inadequate best. Deliberately, cautiously, the old woman will pry out spikes from the body of her story, hoping for it.”
And that's the premise of And the Rat Laughed.

The granddaughter can hardly explain and or be witness as to what her grandmother tells her. Her ordeal was as a child, which as an old lady she can hardly articulate those suppressed five-year-old memories of herself. The Granddaughter can do nothing but surmise and with that she and her fellow school friends create an internet poetry site called “girl&rat.com”

From there, a cult occurs that turns the holocaust memories of the grandmother into a commercial enterprise of pop song and Disney. I would suggest that our modern world of commercialisation of just about every tenet of human existence may also be thematic to the story told.
As a species, we soon forget, and quite fast at times. When we don't memory can become cumulative and that is the very point of The Dream, the sci fi chapter. Even after an archeologically discovery of diaries of the priest that saved the little girl, the future narrator is considering Holocaust denial among others things. After this chapter, we are presented with the actual diary of the priest. I was profoundly moved by his questioning of his faith, his disgust at the congregation he serves, his own personal torment. This was a moving end to an exceptional book.