The background to Heinrich Böll's fine novel [Billiards at Half Past Nine] is one of the most mysterious places in the world, the Catholic Rhineland. He writes with piercing clarity of the chemical smoke blowing over willows and black barges, autobahnen through the beet fields, Romanesque churches, Roman tombs. (p. 887)

Robert Faehmel, a successful quantity surveyor, had been involved in resistance in 1935 when he was a schoolboy. Through his friend Schrella he joined a strange pacifist sect, known as the Lambs, whose oath was 'never to taste the Buffalo Sacrament'. With Schrella he was beaten up, fled into exile, but returned to join the army and to marry Schrella's sister. A captain in the Engineers in 1945, he blew up the Abbey which his father Heinrich had built; in 1958 his son, Joseph, also an architect, is restoring the Abbey. The action takes place during one day, on which...