The Assault Review

The Assault review: one night, five acts of understanding

This The Assault review begins with what Harry Mulisch reveals almost immediately. In Haarlem in January 1945, during the final winter of the German occupation of the Netherlands, twelve-year-old Anton Steenwijk is at home with his parents and older brother Peter. Six shots kill Fake Ploeg, a Dutch police inspector notorious for collaboration, outside the neighboring Korteweg house. Mr. Korteweg and his daughter Karin drag the body to the pavement in front of the Steenwijks' home. German forces arrive, destroy the house, and Anton loses his family in the reprisal. The book's central suspense is not whether disaster will occur. It is how Anton, and the reader with him, will understand the human decisions arranged around it.

Mulisch's governing insight is that an event does not keep a stable meaning simply because it is over. Anton survives with only fragments: the sight of the body being moved, a dark cell shared with an unseen wounded woman, disconnected words, and no complete account of what happened to the people he loved. Across the next thirty-six years, chance encounters supply pieces that he did not know were missing. Each piece alters the story, but none can restore the dead or turn history into a consoling solution.

That structure gives The Assault the forward pull of a mystery while denying the moral simplification of an ordinary whodunit. The novel does eventually answer factual questions, yet its deeper achievement is to separate explanation from absolution. Knowing why a person acted does not make every action right, and tracing a chain of consequences does not distribute equal blame to everyone in it. This review discusses the opening attack, the five-episode design, and the important people Anton later meets. It does not disclose the final explanation for the body's placement, the revelation on which the last episode turns.

De aanslag, The Assault, and L'Attentat

The novel first appeared in Dutch as De aanslag, published by De Bezige Bij in September 1982. The Assault is not an alternative work or a sequel but the established English title. Claire Nicolas White translated it into English, and Pantheon published the first American edition in 1985. The Open Library cover used on this page belongs to that Pantheon edition, so presenting the book under its English title makes the metadata, cover, and review agree while preserving De aanslag as the original title.

The French title also has a documented publication history. Philippe Noble's translation, L'Attentat, was first published by Calmann-Lévy in 1984; Actes Sud and Leméac issued a later French-language edition in 2001. These titles emphasize slightly different aspects of the same Dutch word. In English, “assault” can suggest an attack in a broad sense; the French attentat more immediately signals a politically motivated act. Mulisch needs both the targeted killing and the retaliation that follows it. The resistance attack begins the plot, but Anton's life is shaped by the occupying power's punitive response.

The distinction matters because the title can tempt a reader to treat the book as a conventional wartime thriller. It is much more controlled and retrospective than that label suggests. The assassination occupies the opening movement; the rest of the novel studies its long wake. The English translation's lucid, spare surface serves that design well: scenes are readable without being emotionally explanatory, leaving patterns of image, coincidence, and withheld knowledge to accumulate beneath Anton's apparently orderly adult life.

Five episodes make memory a structure

After a brief prologue, Mulisch divides the novel into five episodes dated 1945, 1952, 1956, 1966, and 1981. The gaps are not empty chronology. They are the years in which Anton builds a life that seems to move away from Haarlem: he is raised by relatives in Amsterdam, studies medicine, becomes an anesthesiologist, marries, has children, divorces, and marries again. Mulisch summarizes enough of this ordinary development to show that survival is real. He then narrows each episode to a day or encounter in which the buried past becomes unexpectedly present.

In 1952, Anton returns to Haarlem and visits the Beumers, the neighbors who lived on the other side of his family. In 1956, amid unrest following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, he encounters Fake Ploeg's son. In 1966, a funeral brings him into contact with Cor Takes, a former resistance fighter whose knowledge changes Anton's understanding of the woman from the dark cell. In 1981, while Amsterdam fills with demonstrators opposing nuclear weapons, another accidental meeting completes the factual pattern. The widening intervals measure not forgetting but the failure of forgetting to remain complete.

This episodic method is more sophisticated than a sequence of flashbacks. Mulisch does not send the adult Anton repeatedly into a fully dramatized memory. Instead, the past enters through other people, each carrying a position Anton cannot occupy: neighbor, collaborator's child, resistance veteran, participant, witness. Memory therefore becomes social rather than purely private. Anton owns his experience, but he does not own all the facts or all the grief connected with it.

The coincidences are deliberate and conspicuous. Readers who demand strict realism may find it convenient that the right person appears at each historical threshold. Yet the novel treats coincidence as a subject, not a hidden contrivance. Anton's catastrophe began because a corpse was moved a few metres from one house to another. Mulisch builds a world in which proximity, timing, and arbitrary placement can redirect a life, then asks whether discovering intentions can ever cancel the role of chance.

Assassination and reprisal in the Hunger Winter

The first episode is set during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, when people in the occupied western Netherlands faced severe shortages of food and fuel. Curfew, darkness, cold, and scarcity are not decorative historical atmosphere. They create a civilian world already narrowed by occupation before the shooting occurs. The Steenwijks are playing a board game at home because public life has contracted; the sound of gunfire makes the coercive order outside enter their room in seconds.

Fake Ploeg is not presented as a neutral public servant randomly selected for death. He is a collaborating police inspector feared for his brutality. His assassination belongs to a resistance struggle against an occupying system and its Dutch helpers. The German response, however, follows the punitive logic of occupation: the body in front of a house becomes grounds for collective retaliation against the people associated with that address. The home is burned, Anton is detained, and his parents and brother are killed. Historical research on the Netherlands in 1945 documents both the desperate conditions of the Hunger Winter and the ruthless reprisals with which Nazi forces answered resistance.

Mulisch refuses two opposite distortions. He does not romanticize political killing by ignoring the danger it brings to civilians, and he does not erase the difference between resistance action and Nazi terror. Cor Takes can defend the necessity of acting against Ploeg while still living with the deaths attached to that act. Anton can ask what the resistance fighters expected without thereby making them the authors of the occupiers' policy. The moral field is complicated, but it is not flat.

This is why the novel's repeated questions about guilt require careful reading. A causal chain can include the shooters, the neighbors who moved the body, the German troops, the collaborator himself, and people who protected others without making every link ethically identical. Mulisch is interested in degrees, intentions, constraints, and consequences. The Nazi reprisal remains an exercise of occupying power, even when the plot reveals smaller decisions that affected where it landed.

Anton Steenwijk and the discipline of distance

Anton is not a revenge-driven protagonist. His characteristic response is distance: from Haarlem, from political debate, from emotional excess, and sometimes from his own knowledge. He prefers the apparent order of a medical career and becomes an anesthesiologist. It is tempting to turn that profession into a simple symbol—Anton numbs others because he has numbed himself—but Mulisch is subtler than the equation. Anesthesia is also controlled attention to pain, consciousness, and the body's vulnerable thresholds. Anton's work both resembles avoidance and contradicts it.

His adult life prevents the novel from claiming that trauma suspends all development. Anton can love, work, travel, parent, and participate in a social world. At the same time, physical symptoms and involuntary associations show that the past has not become inert. Mulisch rarely gives him long confessions. The reader instead sees pressure through changes in attention, sudden recognition, migraine-like crises, and the intensity with which a stray detail links one decade to another.

That reserve is a strength because it protects Anton from becoming a case study with a single diagnosis. It is also a possible barrier. Readers accustomed to explicit interior narration may find him passive, especially because crucial information so often comes to him through coincidence. But his passivity has moral meaning. As a child, he was acted upon by forces he could not comprehend; as an adult, he has made non-engagement into a method of safety. The novel's question is not whether he will become conventionally heroic. It is whether he can receive knowledge without using it either to punish indiscriminately or to protect himself with vagueness.

Anton is thus less a detective than the site at which incompatible memories meet. He does not solve the past through superior reasoning. Other people hand him pieces, sometimes defensively and sometimes because they need their own version to be heard. His achievement is smaller and more credible: he learns to carry a more exact account than the one with which he began.

Truus Coster, Fake Ploeg's son, and Cor Takes

The woman in the dark cell is the novel's first counterweight to terror. Anton cannot see her, but her wounded presence, warmth, and words become the most intimate surviving part of the night. Later he learns that she was Truus Coster, a resistance fighter. Mulisch delays that identity so that Anton first remembers not a historical role but a voice and touch. Political history reaches him through bodily care before it reaches him through explanation.

The 1956 encounter with Fake Ploeg's son creates a different pressure. The son bears his father's name and the postwar consequences of his disgrace, but he did not choose the father's actions. His anger forces Anton to recognize that suffering can extend into the collaborator's family without making the collaborator innocent. Their confrontation is one of the book's clearest demonstrations of moral asymmetry: two sons inherit pain from the same night, yet the histories they inherit are not interchangeable.

Cor Takes, met in 1966, brings the perspective of the resistance itself. He has not achieved Anton's distance. The war remains present in his habits, loyalties, losses, and judgments. Through him, Truus becomes more than the consoling figure preserved in Anton's childhood memory. Takes also refuses a comfortable account in which resistance is clean simply because its enemy was criminal. He understands the stakes of action, but he does not pretend that necessity prevents grief.

Together these characters keep Anton from making the past solely about the Steenwijks. They enlarge the novel without turning it into a panoramic war epic. Each meeting remains concentrated, almost theatrical, and each voice changes the moral proportions of the opening scene. The final episode adds one more necessary perspective, but its particular explanation is best encountered in the novel rather than summarized in a review.

Guilt, causality, and moral asymmetry

The most impressive feature of The Assault is its refusal to make explanation do the work of forgiveness. The plot gradually clarifies who moved the body, who fired the shots, who shared the cell, and what pressures lay behind decisions. A lesser novel might treat the completed chain as a solution. Mulisch treats it as the point at which judgment becomes more demanding. Motives can make an act intelligible while leaving its damage intact.

Anton repeatedly confronts versions of the question “Who is guilty?” The grammar encourages a single answer, but the novel supplies different kinds of agency. The occupying soldiers possess coercive power; Ploeg chose collaboration and brutality; resistance fighters chose an attack under conditions created by occupation; neighbors made a desperate local decision; children inherited consequences. These facts belong to one story without belonging to one moral category.

The book's volcanic imagery reinforces that distinction. The 1945 night resembles an eruption that buries a life, while later episodes expose fragments like objects preserved beneath ash. Archaeology can reconstruct positions and sequences, but it cannot reverse the eruption. Nor does the recovered pattern prove that the disaster was fated. The force of the novel lies in the tension between a design that becomes legible and the contingency that made it possible.

Mulisch also connects private memory to public history. The later episodes occur against the Korean War era, the Hungarian uprising, the Vietnam-era 1960s, and the 1981 peace demonstration. Anton's personal chronology runs beside Europe's changing political concerns. The point is not that each conflict repeats 1945 exactly. It is that the world continues to argue about force, allegiance, ideology, and civilian risk while Anton tries to treat his own history as closed.

Style, strengths, and cautions

Mulisch writes with compression and formal confidence. The opening has the clarity of a nightmare: domestic routine, gunshots, a body, neighbors crossing a pavement, armed men, fire, darkness. Later episodes are quieter, but objects and sensations recur across the gaps—stone, ash, flame, darkness, touch—so that the novel acquires unity without constant explanation. Claire Nicolas White's English translation preserves a prose that is accessible yet cool enough to resist melodrama.

The strongest sections are the confrontations in which two defensible but incomplete accounts occupy the same room. Mulisch lets conversation carry historical argument without turning characters into mere positions. He also knows when to stop. The novel is short, and its economy gives each return to 1945 disproportionate weight. Readers who prefer an expansive social portrait may wish that secondary lives received more space, but that expansion would weaken the pressure-chamber design.

There are two fair cautions beyond the difficult subject matter. First, the planned sequence of encounters is visibly artificial. Readers who dislike symbolic coincidence may resist it even though chance is central to the book's argument. Second, Anton's emotional control can feel cold. The novel offers recognition rather than cathartic release. It includes assassination, execution and reprisal, the deaths of parents and a sibling, detention of a child, wartime hunger and cold, and long psychological aftereffects.

Its restraint should not be mistaken for neutrality. The Assault is precise about occupation and collaboration while remaining willing to examine the costs and compromises of resistance. That combination is harder to achieve than generalized moral ambiguity. The novel's strength is not that everyone might be equally guilty; it is that an exact judgment must account for unequal power as well as intimate consequence.

Reader fit, historical companions, and alternatives

The Assault is an excellent fit for readers who like concise novels that become larger through structure. It suits readers interested in the literary fiction of memory and in history and ideas approached through one civilian life. Its mystery-like revelations make it accessible, but anyone expecting combat scenes, espionage, or a fast thriller should adjust expectations. The action is concentrated in the first episode; the lasting drama is interpretive.

It is also a strong book-club choice because its questions can be argued without reducing the discussion to whether the ending surprises. Was Anton's distance a healthy survival strategy or a form of unfinished attention? When does causal responsibility become moral responsibility? Can a necessary political act still impose obligations on those who carry it out? Why does the novel place its last revelation amid a mass protest about a different kind of threatened violence?

For another novel about a childhood act, wartime consequence, and the ethics of reconstruction, read Atonement; McEwan is more expansive and metafictional, while Mulisch is more compressed and externally structured. Catch-22 uses repetition and absurdity to expose military systems from within, providing a loud formal contrast to Mulisch's restraint. A Gentleman in Moscow offers a warmer, more hospitable account of a private life constrained by twentieth-century political power.

Readers seeking a single volume that balances narrative momentum with ethical complexity should begin with The Assault itself rather than the film adaptation. Its achievement depends on the spacing of the episodes and on the reader's changing relation to the opening scene. Those formal effects belong specifically to the novel.

Final assessment

The Assault earns its reputation through architecture rather than scale. One winter night is followed by five acts of partial understanding, and every new fact changes the past without replacing it. Mulisch makes coincidence visible, lets witnesses disagree, and turns a survivor's reserve into both a coping method and a limit.

Most importantly, the novel refuses the easy conclusion that complexity makes judgment impossible. It can acknowledge the compromised choices of resistance, the suffering inherited by a collaborator's child, and the panic of neighbors while remaining clear about the occupying power that made collective reprisal possible. Its moral intelligence lies in holding explanation and asymmetry together.

Readers willing to accept a cool protagonist, conspicuous coincidences, and a deliberately withheld final answer will find a compact historical novel with unusual staying power. The opening asks what happened to Anton Steenwijk. The completed design asks the harder question: what can later knowledge change, and what must it leave irreparable?