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Don't go away. Rolf has another son named Holger by former wife Veronica, a radical who is raising the boy in the Middle East and/or Turkey where she lives underground with a lover, whose wardrobe includes an exploding vest. Herbert, Fritz Tolm's other son, also belongs to an "alternate society." A married daughter, Sabine, is not politically inclined, though she has taken a compromising position with Hendler, her security guard, and is expecting his child. By fast count the novel contains over 70 other characters engaged in various plays, stances, conspiracies and love affairs both hetero-and homosexual.
Thus summarized, The Safety Net sounds like Dallas auf Deutsch. But Böll has the technical skills to lighten weighty social themes. His best narrrative trick is to keep the public Stürm und Drang at bay and focus on the private lives laid bare by pervasive surveillance. Suspense takes a back seat. Somewhere, hazily defined terrorists are poised to punish Tolm for his real and imagined sins of omission. Will the assault be by cake bomb, a flight of mechanical birds stuffed with explosives or a mysterious boy with a "bomb in his head"? Who will attempt to kill Tolm, where and when, is not so important as how this highly concentrated bit of modern society keeps its humanity when its every move is known. For the most part, the irony of Tolm's character is well realized: privately, he is a decent, doddering family man; publicly, he is an inflammatory symbol in an ideological passion play. But as an ambivalent humanist figurehead for Big Business, he earns little sympathy or credence. It is never clear whether Tolm adequately understands a world where there can be Russian caviar and Cuban cigars on Wall Street and Monopoly sets in the Kremlin.
—By R.Z. Sheppard
Excerpt
"There remained only one question, to which the answer contained some consolation: what good would it do them to kill him off without at least profiting by the publicity? ... no machine pistols ... just an accident in the bathtub—what would they get out of that? What good would it do them?
After him it would be Amplanger's turn, one of the 'new men': ruthlessly dynamic, jovial, robust—his smile was enough to scare a person, and perhaps they needed him quickly to kill him off spectacularly, and could therefore get himself—Tolm—quietly out of the way. Amplanger stood for stock exchange, Olympic shooting team, tennis, Zummerling, and teeth-grinding ruthlessness. Perhaps they wanted to speed up Amplanger's election—he, Tolm, radiated too many humanistic thoughts, self-doubts, too much capitalist melancholy. "