Het A.P. Beerta-Instituut

With this fourth — and longest — part, we reach the mid-point of the series. We're in the years 1975-79, so Maarten Koning has now been at the Office for twenty years, and he's reached his fifties. The focus changes from the international scientific disputes which dominated Part Three, and

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we're now much more involved with Maarten's struggles to come to terms with his role as a manager and find ways to impose his authority on co-workers who have different ideas about how the job should be done — and indeed about what the job actually is, as there are still plenty of grey areas in the definition of ethnology as a subject.

The foreground is filled, as always, with the minute detail of coffee-breaks, filing-systems, staff-meetings and committees, but slightly offstage there's also the less distinct story of how Maarten's work is affecting his marriage. Maarten's mother-in-law is declining gradually into dementia, whilst Beerta is still mentally alert but has never quite recovered physically from the stroke he suffered at the end of Part Three, and is now living in a care-home. As the title has already given it away, it's no surprise to see this part ending with the Office being renamed in Beerta's honour. Other memorable set-pieces include a rather harrowing week of interviews of candidates for a vacant post, and a couple of departmental outings, on one of which Maarten has to be saved from sinking into a morass.

The scale and level of trivial detail of this novel is such that you sometimes get the depressing illusion that you're reading it in real time, and that Maarten will never catch up with you in age, but that's also its strength: it's easy to believe that no-one else has ever got close to the realism with which Voskuil captures the wave of despair that runs through you when you hear the words "I just have a small point concerning the minutes of the last meeting..."

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