My 20th and final book for the 20 Books of Summer challenge is the winner of this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Alice Jolly’s The Matchbox Girl. I wasn’t sure about reading this book as I’d heard that it was written in an unusual style, but as reading the Walter Scott Prize shortlists is a personal project of mine, I knew I’d have to at least give it a chance.

The matchbox girl of the title is Adelheid Brunner who is twelve years old when the novel opens in 1934. Accompanied by her pet rat Franz Joseph, Adelheid arrives at the Vienna Children’s Hospital where she will stay for a while to be assessed and observed by a team of doctors. It was her grandmother’s decision to send her there as she was struggling to cope with Adelheid’s unusual fixations, such as her obsession with collecting matchboxes which she is constantly counting, arranging and putting in order. One of the doctors at the hospital, referred to by Adelheid as Dr A, shows a particular interest in her behaviour because it aligns with his research into what he calls ‘autistic psychopathy’.

Dr A, as we’ll find out later, is Hans Asperger, the man whose name was given to Asperger’s Syndrome, although that term is no longer used for various reasons – partly because people are usually now diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum rather than with specific conditions, but also because of Hans Asperger’s ties with the Nazis. This Nazi connection becomes an important part of the novel as the years go by and the war gets under way. Adelheid is now working as an assistant in the Vienna Children’s Hospital, copying and typing records. She knows that some children are being transferred to another clinic, Am Spiegelgrund, where they’ll supposedly receive specialist treatment, but through her work with the hospital records, Adelheid discovers that these children are described as ‘useless eaters’ – in other words, not considered worthy of life or conforming to the Nazi ideal – and once they are sent there, they’re unlikely to return.

Dr Asperger’s role in all of this is quite ambiguous in the novel; we’re seeing things from Adelheid’s point of view and she doesn’t understand exactly what’s going on. How much knowledge did Asperger have of what was happening at Am Spiegelgrund and what was the extent of his involvement with the Nazis? In reality, it does seem that there’s still some debate around this and the level of his complicity. The other doctors and nurses are also people who really existed and Jolly incorporates some of their personal stories into the novel too, for example Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl, who also carried out research into autism at the hospital but were forced to flee Austria for America because they were Jewish, and Sister Viktorine and Dr Feldner, who both bravely try to defy the Nazi regime.

As well as collecting matchboxes, Adelheid loves writing in her notebooks, which she does compulsively. She never speaks – she’s not sure what she should and shouldn’t say, so it’s safer to not speak at all – but her voice still comes across strongly through her unusual way of writing. Unfortunately, I found this as irritating as I’d anticipated: random words have capital letters, there are no quotation marks around speech and Adelheid often repeats words three times (“For so long everything was the samesamesame. Until it was all changechangechange”). I do understand what Alice Jolly was trying to do here and I suppose it was quite effective, but I found it so distracting I couldn’t get invested in the story as much as I would have liked.

Still, the setting and subject were interesting enough to make this a worthwhile read for me. The insights into how children with autism were viewed and treated in the 1930s were fascinating and so was the portrayal of life in Nazi controlled Vienna. I can see why the Walter Scott Prize judges were impressed with this book, even if it wasn’t a complete success with me.

Book 20/20 of 20 Books of Summer