Norman Lebrecht, an eminent British musicologist, won the 2002 Whitbread First Novel Award for his "The Song of Names." His new book, "The Game of Opposites," is a complex and ambitious second offering. Set in a remote village in an unnamed country (it is clearly western Germany's Bavaria), the story centers on Paul Malinowski (who changes his name to Miller to conceal his nationality), a slave laborer from an unnamed country (clearly Poland) conscripted by the Nazis to work in a labor camp close by that isolated village. The camp's commandant, Hannes Kerner, is a brutal sociopath personally responsible for inmate murders and deaths by starvation and disease.

Only days before the village is liberated by the U.S. Army, Kerner and his crew of guards flee, and Miller walks out to the village where he is taken in and restored to health by Alice, an innkeeper's daughter. Aided by his relationship to the American officer who is commanding the local occupation force, Miller rises to dominate village politics and commerce. He marries Alice, fathers a son and leads the way to postwar prosperity.

When Kerner returns to the area, Miller must decide if he will take revenge or put his horrendous past behind him, but he is hampered in his thinking by a crippling case of survivor's guilt.

Hamlet-like Miller's dilemma is the novel's emotional and moral center. He seeks guidance from the village doctor, from a psychiatrist and from several of his ex-prisoner friends, who thrive now in the criminal underground of the country's postwar recovery.

But the story's narrative pace gives way to Miller's almost unceasing introspection and too-frequent philosophical dialogues. Pace is also slowed by some lengthy expository flashbacks to his prewar life, which includes a first love killed, along with Miller's mother, by a Nazi officer when his country is overrun by the German Army.

The topic of the hundreds of thousands of laborers shipped to Germany from occupied countries to man the conquerors' factories and farms is grim. It is deserving of Lebrecht's serious fictional treatment of a history that merits a reader's attention, even if that treatment is at times flawed in minor respects.

Gordon Weaver is a Wisconsin-based writer.