[This is an excerpt from a longer essay on Böll's novels from these pages.]

BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE is probably the most powerful of Böll’s novels, but the much later Safety Net has a haunting interest of its own because of the way the author “worries away” at his characters, as Salman Rushdie says, and because it is really not about “the war” even in an extended sense. Of course various historical monsters show up, and it’s a fine sly touch for a man to have a literal corpse in a vault — that of the woman he killed to get at a pile of money — as his figurative skeleton in a closet. But the central scene is the estate of a newspaper magnate in an age of terror and security, those mutually reinforcing realities that keep turning into phantoms of themselves. “They’re forever conjuring up the Red peril,” the magnate’s wife says of her fellows among the rich. “They see the revolution at the door.” They’re wrong about the revolution, but something is indeed at the door, since young members of the magnate’s own family are terrorists in the Baader-Meinhof style. They are not going to penetrate the elaborate security systems that have been set up, but they have in part caused those systems to come into being. And security on the scale imagined in this novel means effective imprisonment in your luxury home, phone taps, guards everywhere, no trips without escorts, the abolition of privacy, a world in which “everything, every courteous gesture, was transformed into both surveillance and threat.” 

And yet, as Böll reminds us in a characteristic swerve, although security in one sense is everywhere, in another sense it has died. “They should have realized that there was no such thing as security, either internal or external; he knew that all these measures had to be yet would prevent nothing.” This is the magnate speaking of himself and his wife, and of course he hasn’t quite got the whole picture. It’s part of Böll’s quietness that he leaves us to put that together for ourselves. We know that security does prevent all kinds of things, including sometimes what it is meant to prevent. But it also creates what it seeks to protect us from, and — the magnate’s grand claim is true in this respect — there is no such thing as certain or terminal security.