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Oscar & Lucy by Alan Kennedy (view source)
Revision as of 10:37, 18 January 2015
, 10:37, 18 January 2015no edit summary
With the film about Alan Turing, ''The Imitation Game'' getting rave reviews and award nominations right, left and centre, the sterling work done by the Bletchley Park cryptographers during WWII is quite high in our minds. But Enigma wasn't the only code broken and Turing wasn't the only one doing secret but heroic work.
In ''Oscar & Lucy'', Alan Kennedy uncovers one of those little known stories - a story that was just one story among many in one man's remarkable life. Oscar Oesler Oeser was a physics graduate but became a pioneering psychologist whose relationship with his discipline was highly fraught. He worked in Germany during the rise of Nazism, was a significant figure during WWII and took his secrets with him to his grave.
Kennedy knew Oesler Oeser as his boss in his first post-doctorate teaching post in Australia. He was an enigmatic figure and Kennedy had had no idea of his past until he came across the name Oscar Oesler Oeser during research for a novel he was writing about the war. The brief mention was tantalising enough for Kennedy to put his novel on hold and embark upon a journey of discoveries about OeslerOeser. And the resulting book is a mix of autobiography and biography, with a side serving of the troubled history of the discipline of psychology.
It's a slim volume; just eighty-odd pages, but somehow it feels bigger than that. As you can see, it covers a lot of material and it's all endlessly fascinating. Oscar's story alone is worth telling but it's anchored in a partial memoir of Kennedy's own early career and set against a background of the development of psychology. It's beautifully written with great clarity; as accessible to the lay person as the student of pyschology or the lover of history. And, as serious as the themes are, there's an underlying wryness and sense of humour that makes ''Oscar & Lucy'' a pleasure to read. We Brits do self-deprecation remarkably well.