A Game with Sharpened Knives

by Neil Belton

Book Overview

1941. Murder is in the air. Ireland is a country not truly at peace, either with Germany or with its neighbor across the Irish Sea. Erwin Schrodinger, cosmopolitan intellectual and emotional enigma,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0753818019
• ISBN13: 9780753818015
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

The Emergency

Neil Belton takes on the tricky business of revealing an obscure and brilliant intellect, deliberately removed and enigmatic, at a time when Europe is convulsed by the Second World War, perhaps the most brutal and morally defined catastrophe in the history of civilisation. Some readers will be disappointed that little action of the white or black knight variety, or exported cliches of the kind that make Irish pubs the toast of the world, can be found in 'A Game with Sharpened Knives.' But this was never Belton's intention. Instead, hived off from the guns and bombs, Ernest Schrodinger, author of the most famous cat since the Sphinx, flees Nazi Germany and takes sanctuary in neutral Dublin, where the President of the Irish Republic, de Valera, has created an asylum for leading scientists. What could be cosier? But as Schrodinger combines a domestic menage a trois with the receptive tabla rasa of theoretical physics, he is stalked by an agent of his former homeland. Belton plays on the stultifying purgatory of a quasi neutral country (de Valera says divided Ireland is neither alive nor dead) to bring Shrodinger's cat home to haunt him, so that from one moment to the next, through the fog and the black out, we never forget the rumbling confusion, the sheer anxiety of ideas, that led to the war in the first place.