This taut and dramatic novel tells of the last adventure of a great Loyalist hero, an exile living in France since the end of the spanish civil war. Combining thriller with acerbic comedy, this highly original story, set in the High Pyrenees, was made into a 1964 film Behold A Pale Horse starring Gregory Peck, Antony Quinn and Omar Sharif.
Original introduction
Our respect for the law is tempered - sometimes - by our admiration for those who successfully break it. Outlaws, bandits, escaping prisoners - we can't help being on their side, at any rate on paper at a safe distance in a novel.
In Emeric Pressburger's story our judgment can easily be suspended, but although entertained and excited we are not left with the feeling that we have been tricked into condoning crime. Questions of religion, of conscience, of love, of loyalty, even of justice, with things the law can take no account of.these are at the back of a story where comedy mingles with tragedy in the high Pyrenees.
Who was in the right we may never be able to decide. Only one thing is sure: this is a highly original novel, with the elements of a thriller, the romance of banditry in the mountains, the comedy of authority set at defiance, the undercurrent of ancient wrongs and of more recent political rancour.
- Daniel George in the BROADSHEET
A novel. A very novel novel
The Glass Pearls, is about a concentration camp doctor, Otto Reitmüller, hiding in London under a pseudonym and haunted by the idea of being hunted down, the boarding house in which Reitmüller lives recalls the one in Pressburger's first feature film for UFA: Robert Siodmak's Abschied (1930), with its lodgers meeting and gossiping in the hall. Reitmüller, a violinist (like Pressburger himself), has escaped from Germany to Paris and is now trying to camouflage his past, earning his living as a piano tuner. The novel conveys Pressburger's horror at the paradox that otherwise cultured people - people who like himself "adored Rosenkavalier", educated figures who had taken the Hippocratic oath - could behave monstrously and participate in horrific crimes. "I always believed, and I have to say that there are also good Germans, one or two, though the great majority of them proved to be pretty awful, pretty horrible," he said.
That edition seems to be now out of print. It's been reissued / reprinted by Faber. See Amazon.com edition here.
