Christoph Fischer: The Luck of the Weissensteiners (2012)

Edition: ebook provided by author (2013)
Review number: 1474

The story of Slovakia in the thirties and forties is likely to be quite obscure to most British people, even those interested in the Second World War (which, as far as the histories commonly read in the UK are concerned, mainly happened in Western Europe, the North Atlantic, North Africa, and the Far East). Briefly, Slovakia was part of the Czechoslovakian republic which formed when Austria-Hungary collapsed at the end of the First World War, and had large German and Jewish minorities as part of its population. After Hitler gained power in Germany (the date at which The Luck of the Weissensteiners opens), Slovakia's German population became more powerful and nationalistic, until Czechoslovakia was split up, Slovakia becoming an independent republic which was a German ally (and effectively puppet state) during the war years, hard times to be a Jew in the area.

The central character of the novel, Greta Weissensteiner, is the book-loving daughter of a Jewish weaver, who falls in love with the German shop assistant Wilhelm in the town bookshop in 1933. Over the next few years, the story follows the increasing pressure on their relationship from the political situation in the country, leading to a spilt orchestrated by Wilhelm's rather unpleasant sister and the Weissensteiner family going into hiding.

The story itself and the way that the political changes going on around them affect the lives of the characters are fascinating. Fischer attempts to answer some difficult questions, such as why many people began to accept Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda: many people were fooled into believing that Jews were inferior beings, and didn't just go along with what they were told as a public necessity. Fischer portrays people who are just stupid, or who want to believe the lies for other, personal, reasons. Other aspects of The Luck of the Weissensteiners were less to my taste, however. One of the quirks of Fischer's writing is the way that the reader is frequently told the emotions and desires of the characters directly. Many paragraphs in this novel start with sentences like "Apart from the fear, she also felt guilty for hurting his feelings", chosen from a random page about half way through. This occurs so often that it begins to feel as though the narrative has a huge number of different viewpoints which are swapped between almost randomly. I often found the dialogue rather stilted, too, and so never really managed to suspend disbelief in the story. Other readers might well not be as finicky about this kind of stylistic point as I am, but for me these problems rather spoiled what was otherwise an interesting story with an interesting setting. My rating: 5/10.

E. Phillips Oppenheim: Last Train Out (1941)

Described in his heyday as "the Prince of Storytellers", the name of E. Phillips Oppenheim was familiar to me pretty much only from the back covers of the Leslie Charteris novels I own in these Hodder yellow jacket editions. When I saw this one - in a book case in the garden of a cottage in the Welsh mountains containing books for sale to support education charities working in Africa - I was keen to take the chance to make my acquaintance with the author. (I would never have thought of searching for it, though; this kind of serendipity is one major reason why physical second hand bookstores are such wonderful places.)

Published in 1941, Last Train Out must be one of the earliest thrillers to describe the build up to the Second World War. Its story is built around the escape of a Jewish banker from Vienna to Switzerland from before the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938 to just after the declaration of war on Germany by Britain in France in September 1939 following the German invasion of Poland.

The hero of Last Train Out, Charles Mildenhall, is an upper class British adventurer, working for the Foreign Office in a role somewhere between a diplomat and a troubleshooting spy. It is he, for example, who travels to Poland to assure the leaders there that Britain and France would indeed honour their treaty commitments and declare war if a German invasion takes place. While Oppenheim's novels are publicised on the back of those by Leslie Charteris, Mildenhall resembles the central characters in books by Dornford Yates more than he does the Saint. Apart from his class background, he is more likely to succeed the liberal use of cash than to be supremely useful in a fight with the bad guys. But there are qualities Mildenhall shares with Simon Templar. Both use intelligence to work their way through a problem while not being as cerebral as, say, Holmes or Poirot; both have a personal charm well portrayed by their respective writers; and both, as a result, have a large network of friends everywhere they go who can be counted on to provide aid as needed.

Despite the soubriquet bestowed on Oppenheim, I felt there were occasional infelicities in the storytelling in the Last Train. The most noticeable is the sudden jump from the eve of the Anschluss to the eve of the invasion of Poland, with Mildenhall's activities during these seventeen months described only later as he describes them to others. Oppenheim clearly wanted to keep most of the action in Vienna and not bring in characters and activities elsewhere in Europe, but it would have made the story flow better to follow his hero's actions chronologically.

Overall, though, the characters are good, the story is exciting (if a little slow compared to more modern thrillers), and Oppenheim carefully builds up the tension towards the final scenes as the last train out leaves for Switzerland. I was pleased to enjoy reading it, and will look out for more of Oppenheim's novels in the future. My rating - 8/10.


Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1952 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1423

P.R. Reid: The Colditz Story (1952)

Edition:  Coronet, 1972

The Colditz Story is the tale of the British prisoners of war incarcerated in Oflag IV C, Colditz Castle, which was used to hold officers who had already attempted to escape from other camps by the Germans during the Second World War. Reid, as Escape Officer (co-ordinator of escape attempts) helped organise many escapes and was in an ideal position to document them. The book covers the period from Reid's arrival as Colditz was being set up, to his own successful escape to Switzerland a couple of years later.

The story of the ingenious escape attempts from Colditz are almost as famous as that of the Great Escape, and the book was immensely successful, not just becoming a TV series (which this edition was released to tie in with) but a board game which I remember playing in the seventies. The book used to be in just about every library (including school libraries) in the UK. (I don't know if it is this popular today, but it is noticeable that the public libraries I use still have a Second World War section which is much larger than the rest of history put together, so similar tales continue to hold the imagination of the British public.) This means that it will have been read by any voracious male (it almost certainly appeals more to boys) reader of my age or older, and many more will have seen the TV show (I was a few years too young to see it myself.) The story told by Reid is very memorable, and I found myself remembering details I hadn't read for thirty years.

Reid immortalises a particular kind of heroics, which is also one stereotypically associated with the products of the British public school system. It is all about the battle of wits with the Germans, and the game effectively become more important than the ends. Clausewitz is frequently quoted as saying that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." (It is in fact a slight misquotation.) But to Pat Reid and others like him, usually enthusiastic products of an English public school, it would be more correct to suggest that was was the continuation of the sports field by other means. However, the value of an escape (to anyone other than the escapee) was in the end not in the chess game which led to it.

So, is is really the duty of every prisoner of war to attempt to escape? Reid takes it for granted that this is the case, so much so that he doesn't even discuss the officers' reasons for making achingly difficult escape attempts (such as carrying out such a convincing simulation of insanity that the escapee risked suffering mental damage as a result). According to Wikipedia's list, there were 37 successful escapees from Colditz, 10 of them British. This is a vanishingly small number among the war's combatants, and it is not likely that any of them would have been so effective individually that their escape would have made a direct military difference to the outcome of the war. (This argument doesn't hold so well for other nationalities, such as the French and Belgians, whose home countries were occupied.)

The only conceivable benefit to the war effort from a successful escape that I can see would be through morale boosting propaganda. I'm not saying that this would be a negligible benefit, but another thing which Reid doesn't mention is what the escapees did on returning home. First British escapee, Airey Neave, went on to work for MI9, the British secret service in charge of aiding resistance movements in occupied Europe, but he was by a long way the most distinguished of the escapees (and probably the best known British inmate with the exception of Douglas Bader). Reid himself was unable to return to Britain until after the war. Others were killed in action, or their escape remained the major event of their war service. Nothing I can see in Wikipedia entries (not necessarily the most authoritative source, but easily accessible) suggests that the British used escapees for propaganda purposes. Compared to the work of SOE, the activities of Schindler, or the dedication of the Bletchley code breakers, POW escapes were extremely unimportant in the history of the War. If it does  not serve the overall aim of winning the war in any particular way, it is surely not a duty bound on every prisoner of war.

Compared to many prisoners of war, those incarcerated in Colditz were not particularly ill treated. Food was sparse, but that was something fairly commonplace in wartime Germany - and it should be remembered that the Nazi regime was not a signatory to the international convention which governed the treatment of prisoners of war (and yet the regime at Colditz seems to have respected the convention's rules - they had exercise, access to primitive medical care, and even received parcels from home). The imprisoned officers were not forced to work themselves to death, or used for medical experimentation, or killed in large numbers, as Jewish prisoners were. They were certainly very well treated compared those British soldiers captured by the Japanese. And in more modern times; the Americans who suffered sleep deprivation in the Gulf, or the terrorist suspects waterboarded by the CIA were worse off. So bad treatment was also not a big motive for escape.

Another question which occurred to me that passed me by thirty years ago was whether escapes like those detailed here would be possible now. Reid says at several points that he is suppressing details, so that the same tricks could be reused without the authorities in the camp being aware of them in advance - he obviously expects the inmates to be more clever than the guards in terms of reading between the lines. But a lot has changed in almost sixty years. There was no electronic surveillance; in fact, the use of microphones hidden around Colditz to detect tunnelling was probably the first move in this direction. So there were no cameras, no use of biometrics (it was even possible to use handmade plaster statues to hide the absence of inmates at roll calls), no electronic keys on doors, no automatic closing of doors when alarms were sounded, and so on. However, we have all of these in prisons today, and yet there are still escaped criminals, so perhaps it would still be possible to get out of a POW camp.

Reid is a product of his class and time. There are so many details in his writing which indicate this; one which is symptomatic is the way that, whenever he introduces a new character, he lists the school (invariably a public school, which says something about how the British armed forces chose officers sixty years ago) attended by the prisoner. Where the school is not one of the best known (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, etc), this is not going to tell the reader much unless they also went to a public school.

Reid's style is unpolished, not that of a journalist or novelist. He consistently uses unvarying derogatory slang: the Germans are always Gerries, the guards are always goons, and so on. He is an extremely keen user of exclamation marks, something which I find particularly irritating when reading. But on the whole the interest of the stories overcomes all the difficulties and makes The Colditz Story a good read. My rating: 6/10.

Olivia Manning: The Great Fortune (1960)

Published: Mandarin, 1990

Olivia Manning's two trilogies featuring Harriet Pringle make up one of my favourite reading experiences of the last couple of years. The Great Fortune is the first book of the earlier Balkan Trilogy, set in Roumania in 1940 during what was known as the Phoney War. The book covers more or less the period from the British declaration of war on Germany to the fall of Paris, during which time Roumania went from being an ally of Britain who guaranteed protection to being a rather reluctant friend of Germany. Naive English newly web Harriet travels to Bucharest with her husband Guy, who teaches English under the auspices of the British Council. She does not speak the language; she has no work; she does not yet know Guy all that well - it was a whirlwind romance. So she is a lonely outsider, standing at the fringes and observing.

Indeed, no important character in the novel is really on the inside. Roumania itself is affected by, but on the fringes of, events in Western Europe; the expatriate British community become more and more isolated as German victories lead up to Dunkirk and the fall of Paris; Guy and Harriet are not really part of the English community, which is split between the British legation and journalists; other characters, such as Prince Yakimov, are excluded by poverty. This last mirrors the condition of the chorus of the Roumanian peasantry, who appear in the guises of mobs and groups of beggars, driven to the city by hunger and exploited by the upper class. (It is the behaviour of the ruling class in the country which provides the novel's title, as they are described as having squandered the "great fortune" of Roumanian natural resources.)

The characters are none of them without faults, naturally - and in some cases, these are what have led to their exclusion from the in crowd. Yakimov is greedy and perpetually whining; Harriet is over-critical. But Guy is portrayed, through his wife's eyes, in the most unflattering way. Charming he may be (and that is a very difficult quality for a writer to portray), but self-centred to an extreme: so much that it is hard to believe that anyone would get to the point of marriage to him without perceiving it and pulling out. The picture is so strong that it quickly becomes clear that part of Harriet's character is involved as well as Guy's: she is an exasperated, bored spouse, tired of being taken for granted when there are new people for Guy to captivate, new projects for him to keep himself in the limelight. Harriet feels that she has a closer relationship with a stray kitten than with the people around her, she is so lonely.

While the theme of exclusion is a major one in The Great Fortune, and indeed flows through the whole of both trilogies, this is not a sad read. The tone of the story is anecdotal, like a memoir rather than a fictional account, despite the third person narrative convention used: this is a woman telling you what she did in the war (even if the fighting is offstage throughout). And Manning is an expert storyteller, putting together a series of set pieces which are amusing vignettes in themselves but which add up to a picture of a lost world - as Roumania under the monarchy in 1940 is far more different from England then or now than any European country is today. The Great Fortune climaxes with a performance of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, directed by Guy, from which only Harriet is excluded (Guy deciding that wives and husbands should not work together, and casting a former girlfriend as Cressida instead). Despite the war situation, and despite Guy's rather naive Communist sympathies, the production is completely apolitical in nature. Even in the amateur dramatic field, it is today commonplace to make productions of plays comment on current affairs, and this particular play is one that lends itself to such treatment, with the very different portrayal of the Trojan and Greek characters. To me, the lack of a political theme in the production is at least as telling a political statement (in the circumstances) as the use of an obvious one would have been, and suggests a lack of involvement which underlines the outsider theme. I don't know whether this would have been Manning's intent, as a straightforward presentation of the play like Guy's would have been more common and certainly expected of a British Council production.

In some ways, The Great Fortune reminds me of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novels, with the same satirical air; but for me Manning is more successful. The interest provided by the background is sadly lacking in Powell's novels, even the ones set during wartime, and Manning is able to solve the plotting problem Powell had with coincidence (both having a small group of characters constantly running into one another by chance) by setting her work in the small emigré community. The absurdities caused by the culture clash between the English and the Roumanians, particularly during the rehearsals for Troilus and Cressida, are to me much more felicitously reminiscent of some of my favourite humourous short stories, Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus collections.

The Great Fortune lays out the ground for the rest of the series of novels in the two trilogies. Understated in a very British way, it is a rather overlooked classic and an antidote to the more melodramatic portrayals of heroism and extreme suffering in the way, though these too have a place.

Len Deighton: City of Gold (1992)

Edition: Arrow, 1993
Review number: 1287

Len Deighton is almost as famous for his meticulously researched World War II stories (and non-fiction) as he is for his Cold War spy thrillers. City of Gold is his farewell to this sub-genre, and I think it is the best of his late novels. Like several others of his Second World War stories, it is inspired by actual events; set in Cairo during the North African campaign, it tells of the hunt for a spy who was revealing all the details of the Allied plans to Rommel, thus enabling him to win victory after victory and make the capture of Cairo seem only a matter of time. The investigation is given a twist because the reader knows that investigator Major Cutler is not really who he appears to be; he suffered a fatal heart attack escorting a prisoner to Cairo, and the prisoner, who was an actor before being conscripted, is now pretending to be the major. So as well as having to make an investigation he is not trained for, he is constantly worried about the possibility of discovery.

This twist adds an extra touch of humanity to the story, which otherwise could easily have been dry for a thriller. As you might expect, Cairo is expertly realised (it is as convincing as the setting in Olivia Manning's Levant trilogy, set in the same place at the same time and written by one who was there), and the background details show the research to have been thorough. Cairo, the city of gold, is a corrupt place in the period, and now it is a frightened one, and so the novel is filled with examples of the sordid side of human nature; Deighton keeps this entertaining rather than depressing.

City of Gold is the best of Deighton's nineties novels, the only one to really score near his classics of earlier decades. Thirty years on from The Ipcress File, Deighton was probably not really thinking about gaining new fans and there is little that is new here; but it is far more successful than MAMista, the only one of his late novels which could be described as innovative.

I can heartily recommend City of Gold to anyone who enjoys war stories; it also makes it clear that Alan Furst has turned out to be Deighton's natural successor in this field.

Len Deighton: Goodbye Mickey Mouse (1982)

Edition: Book Club Associates, 1983 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1251

It seems obvious to compare this novel set in an American fighter unit stationed on a Norfolk airfield in the Second World War with Deighton's earlier Bomber. But although the setting is similar, there are many differences between the novels, at several levels. The tensions between the Americans and the locals - the pilots trying hard to live up to the "overpaid, oversexed and over here" cliché - bring a different atmosphere to the story, as does an unusual interest in public relations, not an aspect of the war effort which gets much attention. (And it resonates - spinning war stories for a media circus is not new to wars fought in the eighties and nineties, by any means.)

Bomber reads as though it's a book based on a documentary, because of its twenty-four hour timespan and the careful research into the background details. While Goodbye Mickey Mouse is obviously as well researched, it doesn't feel like a documentary, because the action is spread over several months, the research is presented less obtrusively, and it has a more complex plot which leads up to a veterans' reunion thirty years later. Deighton has also ditched the German characters which are important in Bomber and drastically reduced the descriptions of flying; Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a far better novel as a result.

Comparisons with Bomber proving something of a red herring, it is actually quite hard to find novels which are much like Goodbye Mickey Mouse. It is mainly the theme of the relationships between the Americans and the local British civilians - not quite conquerors and vanquished, but it must have sometimes felt like it - that is so unusual. A British writer almost exclusively using American points of view is also not common.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse - the title relates to the name given to one of the planes and a discussion about whether a phrase like "goodbye" in a name is unlucky - is not really a thriller, centring as it does on relationships not action. That is, of course, Deighton's intention, but it would not make the novel appeal to fans of, say, his early novels. For the general reader, Goodbye Mickey Mouse is also not perhaps Deighton's most immediately appealing writing, though it would repay the effort required to read it.

Len Deighton: SS-GB (1979)

Edition: Triad Grafton, 1980
Review number: 1248

Because of Deighton's long history as a successful thriller writer before the appearance of SS-GB, it is packaged as a thriller; but in fact it is science fiction dealing with a classic theme of that genre, and would doubtless have been classified as such if it had been a first novel. For this is alternative history, set in a Britain occupied by the Third Reich after a successful 1941 German invasion. Central character Douglas Archer is a senior officer at Scotland Yard, now under the control of the SS. Like many in occupied England, he tries to carry on with his job - criminal investigation - without getting in the way of or thinking too hard about the German occupiers. Crime is, after all, still crime. However, he is gradually drawn into a Resistance plot, much against his better judgement.

The Second World War is a conflict which, because of the hateful policies of the Nazis, has generated many myths, ideas which have become entrenched in popular culture and unquestionable, especially in Britain, no matter what their historical accuracy. These myths include the plucky but ineffective Home Guard, the dedicated airmen and so on - and one of the most powerful is the role of the Resistance in occupied countries. Everybody was apparently on the side of the Resistance, even if they were unable to do anything active, apart from a small number of moral degenerates, congenital traitors. A moment's thought would show that this could not have been the case, particularly given the exceptionally vicious fighting between rival Resistance groups in countries like Greece and Yugoslavia, but it would be hard to write a novel as cynical as Deighton's about a country that had actually been occupied without causing offence. In SS-GB, most people collaborate to some extent or another; many even welcome the Germans for all kinds of reasons; the Germans are far more attractive characters than a lot of the Resistance members.

Another reason for writing this kind of novel is the ability it gives the author to make oblique criticisms. About three quarters of the way through, in a conversation about German brutality, one character says "I wonder if we'd be as bad as they are, if we'd won the war and were occupying Germany". You don't hear much about brutality from the British and American troops occupying West Germany after the war, but it is certainly a comment with an uncomfortable resonance these days in which we hear all the time about abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. It rubs against another Second World War myth, that the Germans were all brutal bullies and the Allies honourable young men.

SS-GB is a fascinating novel, extremely convincing (being based, of course, on Deighton's exhaustive knowledge of the period).

Len Deighton: Bomber (1970)

Edition: Arrow, 1978 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1224

I have always found this the hardest of Deighton's novels to get into, partly because it is so unrelentingly serious, but mainly because its beginning is poor. The first chapter in particular has some really terrible, clunking dialogue, and the mechanics of introducing his large cast of characters are not well handled. Even further into the novel, the prose is ponderous and Bomber is very slow moving for a thriller.

The idea of Bomber is to describe a twenty-four hours in the air war towards the end of the Second World War, without demonising the Germans or idolising the British. The airmen on both sides, in particular, are presented as normal people under a lot of stress. (Some of the ancillary characters are a bit more stereotyped, like the German secret policeman who tries to prove that one of the fliers is sabotaging the war effort, but even he has a less formalised counterpart among the British officers.)

Part of the reason for the ponderousness of Bomber is the literary weight of what Deighton is trying to do - conveying the brutality of war, the waste of a generation of young men, while making his portrayal evenhanded with the reader caring for people on both sides. The unpleasantness of twentieth century warfare and its wastefulness is a common theme from All Quiet on the Western Front to M.A.S.H., but it is far harder to think of other examples of war novels which do not just concentrate on one side. In many cases, the ability this gives to have a small number of central characters makes the writing more effective than it is here - the main characters in All Quiet on the Western Front form a single platoon of German soldiers, and M.A.S.H. never looks far beyond just two doctors. By contrast, there are dozens of characters in Bomber of approximately equal importance, which causes serious difficulties - they tend to be introduced with dull and lengthy biographical sketches, holding up the plot, and it is hard for the reader to remember who is who. (This second is a problem even in War and Peace, the most famous "cast of thousands" novel.) I certainly had the impression that Deighton's ambition here overreached his technique. Nevertheless, there are things to admire about the novel. Bomber is meticulously researched, with close attention to detail. (In current TV terminology, Bomber would definitely belong to the genre of docudrama.)

Thankfully, Bomber livens up a bit once the planes are airborne, about halfway through the five hundred pages. (The bombers being British, the raid is a night-time one; the Americans who carried out daylight raids are not even mentioned by Deighton.) For me, this was really too little too late.

Bomber is massively ambitious, which has led to many aspects of it better done by other authors. The touchstones novels about Second World War bombing are both American: Catch 22 about the stresses and strains of being a pilot, and Slaughterhouse 5 about the effects of saturation bombing (as experienced by P.O.W.s in Dresden). Both these novels are much more effective at conveying the horrors of war and the ways in which people cope with them; both are darkly humorous. Black humour is usually something of a Deighton trademark, but here it seems to have been squeezed out by the serious nature of his intentions.

To me, this novel is mainly of interest as a piece of historical research. Bomber is far less successful as a work of fiction, and remains the nearest to unreadable of any of Deighton's novels.

Stella Gibbons: The Matchmaker (1949)

Edition: Longmans, 1950 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1145

Stella Gibbons is overwhelmingly best known as the author of the hilarious Cold Comfort Farm; so much so that I was surprised to discover the existence of another novel. (It was in a furniture shop, one of a number of old second hand books used to make bookcase shelves look less bare; the shop assistant offered it to me when I picked it up and started looking through it.)

There are many stories about how people endured hardship during the Second World War; less well remembered (as less glamorous) is that life continued to be difficult for many people for some years following its end. In Britain, it was the first war accompanied by massive destruction at home for centuries (since the Civil War in England, or the Jacobean rising in Scotland). Many families were bombed out, and food rationing continued for years. The Matchmaker is about one such family, driven from a middle class existence to a poor cottage in the country, and the people that they meet in the neighbourhood.

The father of the three girls is still in the army, on duty in occupied Germany, so the main focus is on their mother, Alda. She is the incorrigible matchmaker of the title, continually trying to pair people up. (This isn't apparent until the second half of the novel; up till then, Gibbons is describing how Alda and the girls settle in and establishing the characters of those around them, including the Italian prisoners of war working on the neighbouring farm.)

No one who reads this novel now, as forgotten as the aspect of post-War Britain it describes, is likely to be unfamiliar with Cold Comfort Farm. This makes it virtually impossible to read without constantly comparing the two. There are obvious links - both being about the English countryside, portraying it without the sentimentality that pastoral themes often evoke (Cold Comfort Farm is in part an attack on this tendency) - but at first there seem to be more differences. For a start, The Matchmaker doesn't seem to be funny. It is only towards the end, when Alda is shown up as being so bad at fixing people up that the novel begins to amuse, and even then the fun is tempered by the realisation of how much damage this sort of manipulation can do to people. It isn't a parody, but its publication date is close enough to the date at which it is set for it to require knowledge in the reader, just as a parody does; if it were a historical novel published now, The Matchmaker would contain a great deal more explanation. It is a competent and enjoyable novel, and yet it is easy to see that the spark of outrageous humour present in Cold Comfort Farm is missing; that is why one novel has been remembered while the other is forgotten.

Alan Furst: Kingdom of Shadows (2000)

Edition: Gollancz, 2000 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1024

Furst returns once more to Paris at about the beginning of the war, his principal character being a Hungarian nobleman, on the fringes of his country's diplomatic legation to France and the person who carries out the complex political schemes of his Machiavellian uncle as Hitler begins to menace first Austria then Czechoslovakia, threatening much disruption throughout central Europe.

As events move towards the actual outbreak of war, these actions become more desperate and dangerous, and in the end Kingdom of Shadows relies more on action than it does on the background which is so important a feature of Furst's other novels. The most notable feature of the picture of Paris presented in this particular novel is its emphasis on the cosmopolitan nature of the city; virtually no character has a purely French background. The emotional tenor of the novel is provided by the reader's awarenes of what is about to happen - war in a few weeks, Paris occupied in months, no more a safe haven. All the desperate efforts of the central characters are to be for nothing.

Kingdom of Shadows is not quite as good as The World at Night, but is one of Furst's best.

Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (1999)

Edition: Arrow, 2000
Review number: 784

This novel is usually found in the science fiction section of bookshops, but it is entirely set in the present (more or less) or the past. Its subject matter is the reason for it to be placed in the genre; it is about computing. There is an assumption that books about computing, especially those that, like Cryptonomicon, show a reasonable technical knowledge, are at least going to appeal to the readers of science fiction. This is a bit of a stereotyped assumption, but it probably does make good marketing sense (or else it would soon stop being made).

The story is effectively in two parts. Randall Waterhouse is a computer engineer, engaged on a new project (and in a new company) with an old friend. The initial aim of Epiphyte Corp. is to lay a new data cable into the Philippines, but there is a more unusual and interesting hidden agenda.

The other story, which takes up most of the space in the novel, is about the work of Randy's grandfather Lawrence during the Second World War. Like Alan Turing (a friend), he was one of the cryptanalysts whose work paved the way for the development of the modern computer, as well as heading a unit which had the task of making it look to the Germans as though the Allies were very lucky indeed instead of their codes being broken.

These two strands are brought together skilfully at the end, but in this extremely long novel it is the detail which holds the interest, and the clarity with which quite complex mathematics is described. The characterisation is good, and the background is vivid, though the Second World War chapters sometimes feel as though they are descriptions at a remove from actual events, as if Stephen is describing a gritty war film rather than the war itself.

The review quoted on the cover of Cryptonomicon compare it to William Gilbson and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. There is in fact little in common with Gibson, beyond an interest in computers and a similarity in writing style (and that is mainly the common currency of late twentieth century American fiction). The comparison with Gravity's Rainbow is more apt, though Cryptonomicon is less philosophical, far more prosaic. They share similar touches of humour and of course the Second World War engineering background.

While not attempting to touch on the larger questions of Gravity's Rainbow, Cryptonomicon is an excellent novel, one of the first I have read which seriously looks at contemporary cyberculture.

Alan Furst: Red Gold (1999)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1999
Review number: 740

Following on from The World At Night, Red Gold continues to chronicle the exploits of Hugh Casson, one time film producer, as he becomes reluctantly involved with the various anti-German factions of occupied Paris. While definitely wanting the Germans ruling France, Casson is not a hero and probably would have kept his head down and stayed far away from de Gaullists, disgruntled Vichy Regime secret service and certainly the Communists if circumstances has allowed.

As in The World at Night, two components of Red Gold lift it above the usual level of Resistance thrillers: the characterisation of Casson and the atmospheric depiction of wartime France. Red Gold is basically more of the same, as you might expect of a sequel; The World at Night set a high standard which is maintained here.

Alan Furst: The World at Night (1996)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1997
Review number: 580

A French film producer in Paris at the time of the German occupation, the only thing Jean-Luc Casson wants to do is to continue making films, in the same way that millions of other French people wanted to continue their normal lives. Despite his best efforts, he manages to get involved with the Resistance and with the German counter-Resistance, and at the same time falls in love.

A thriller about the French Resistance is nothing new, and neither is the idea of a reluctant hero, a normal person who doesn't want to get involved. Both of these aspects of the novel are very well done. Casson is a believable central character, and the Parisian background is convincing, feeling very French. It is clear that Furst is indebted to writers like Eric Ambler and Georges Simenon, but that is hardly a problem. Just to read this novel is enough to convince me that Furst is one of the best thriller authors writing today.

Anthony McCandless: Leap in the Dark (1981)

Edition: Collins
Review number: 478

Turmoil in Yugoslavia is nothing new. It sparked off the First World War, and was manipulated by both sides during the Second. That manipulation (at least the British part in it) is the foundation for this thriller, which has the background of the SOE sponsorship of resistance groups. As the war approached its end, several of these partisan groups realised that by eliminating their rivals they could dominate post-war Yugoslavia; the Germans would be defeated whatever they did. It was at this point that SOE switched its support from the royalist partisans to Tito's Communists.

This book is not, as many war novels are, a glorification of the heroics of SOE. It is actually about an operation sabotaged from the start: an attempt to begin an Albanian resistance movement organised by a friend of Burgess and MacLean who wants to use it as a cover to create the potential of a Communist state there. Thus the 'patriot' who is dropped is in fact carrying thousands of pounds in gold, contrary to SOE regulations. However, incompetence leads to the man landing in Yugoslavia instead of Albania, and the gold is hidden in a cache which had been used by a banker to hide a fortune in gems before the war. This is the basic set up for the novel, which is really about this cache and its various uses during the thirty years after the war.

Leap in the Dark is a distinctly above average and unusual thriller, with excitement and comedy (mainly at the expense of SOE). Well worth looking out for.

Jack Higgins: The Eagle Has Landed (1975)

Edition: Pan. 1977
Review number: 475

Probably one of the best known and biggest selling thrillers of all time, The Eagle Has Landed has certainly overshadowed the rest of Jack Higgins' career. I've read several of his other novels - each of which seems to have a quoted review on the back saying that it is his best work since The Eagle Has Landed - and they're mainly third rate, not even up to the standard set by the worst parts of this one.

The story of The Eagle Has Landed concerns an attempt to kidnap Churchill during the war by a group of paratroopers dropped on the north Norfolk coast, after German intelligence learns that he is to be staying in a manor house there after making a speech in Kings Lynn. The purpose of this is to produce a propaganda victory that will shock the Allies into the negotiation of peace as the possibility of a German victory looks more and more remote.

The Eagle Has Landed succeeds because the idea is interesting, a reversal of the plot of many thrillers about British SOE style operations (such as The Guns of Navarone), and the characters are not just stereotypes, from the Norfolk villagers to the German paratroops, the IRA man and the Boer-born spy who are the ground contacts for the Germans. These last two are a nice touch, a reminder that not all those who were apparently British were patriotically devoted to the war effort. (There is also a member of the British Frei Korps, the SS regiment of renegade British troops, who is dropped with the paratroopers.) None of them are the standard characters who populate Second World War thrillers; an example of different behaviour from the norm is that the eventual failure of the plot stems from one of the paratroopers diving into the mill stream to save a child, and having his German uniform exposed (it is worn under a Polish special unit one in an attempt to get around the Geneva convention, which specifies that fighting in the uniform of the enemy is forbidden).

The novel is not without flaws, including what seem to be small errors in a generally well-researched background. The idea that such a raid would have a massive effect on the war is perhaps a little far-fetched, though its propaganda value would no doubt be huge. The final twist I find massively unconvincing; it would be impossible to explain why without giving it away. Some terms are used with an anachronistic reference, the title being an example: its resonance is principally with the Apollo moon landings. The Eagle Has Landed nevertheless remains one of the all time classics of the thriller genre, and continues to be exciting even today.

Romain Gary: The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1969)

Translation: By the author
Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1969
Review number: 402

Romain Gary's novel of the Holocaust is like no other. Instead of directly portraying the suffering of the Jews, it looks at the effect it had on those who carried out the tortures, the massacres. Depending on how you look at it, the novel has either one or two major characters, and both they and those around them are symbolic of other things. Police Commissioner Schatz of the small German town of Licht has a shameful secret in his past, shared with hundreds of other Germans of his generation: during the war, he was a sergeant in the SS, and ordered the massacre of Jews. But now he is haunted by the ghost of one of the men whose death he ordered, a comedian who had the stage name Genghis Cohn. A constant reminder of his guilt, Cohn has driven Schatz to the point of secretly keeping Jewish festivals and eating kosher food. At the moment, he is also under severe stress because a mass murderer is at large: over twenty men have been discovered in the forest of Geist around Licht, with no trousers on and expressions of ecstasy: they have been loved to death.

Gary is looking at how, towards the end of the sixties, the Holocaust began to be forgotten as new injustices took its place in the public consciousness: the civil rights movement in the US, the Vietnamese villagers massacred by American soldiers. Jews are no longer the victims they have been throughout history. They are even being invited to accept brotherhood with those who once persecuted them (and Gary quotes the Pope and Charles de Gaulle to show that this was really happening). Cohn is suspicious of this offer, for he realises that this means sharing the guilt of the oppressors.

This is the serious side of the novel, which is also hilariously funny, with a very black style of humour. A comedian in the Warsaw ghetto can hardly have been a "feel good" act, and Cohn's ghost continues to make the reader uneasy even when laughing at his wisecracks.

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5 (1969)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1970
Review number: 291

Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel is one of several American novels dealing in a more or less experimental way with the Second World War which came out in the sixties and early seventies. (Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are other notable examples.) The impetus behind this was presumably - consciously or unconsciously - the Korean and Vietnam Wars; the three novels mentioned are all anti-war, all have an anti-heroic element, all detail horrific actions against the innocent carried out by soldiers scarcely less innocent. It may be that it was only the climate brought about by the news coverage of Vietnam - which also contained these elements - that they felt it was possible to express what they thought of war. (The three books also share an autobiographical atmosphere, in among the exaggeration and tragic comedy, though this may be to do with the prose style. I don't know enough about the authors' own lives to say how much might have been based on their own war experiences.) Even so, both Heller and Pynchon used a stream of consciousness influenced style, and Vonnegut placed his stories in a series of clichés from pulp science fiction; none of them are straightforward narratives.

After an introductory section, apparently about how the novel came to be written, the reader is plunged a deeper level into the narrative. The lengthy subtitle of the novel takes images from both of these levels (the Children's Crusade, aliens from Trafalmadore) to make the book seem almost inexplicable - the opposite of the normal function of a subtitle. The main narrative is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from New England. But it does not tell us his life story, or even concentrate on the war or the bombing of Dresden.

The non-linear temporal structure is simplified through the use of a science fiction cliché: Pilgrim has come loose from normal time. One minute he is experiencing becoming a prisoner of war in Germany in 1945, then he is at his daughter's wedding in the mid-sixties. The identification between Vietnam and the unheroic side of World War II is increased by Pilgrim's son's involvement in the later war.

A second science fiction cliché, the abduction of Pilgrim by the Tralfamadorans, is used to allow Vonnegut to comment on the absurdity of human culture; combined with the time travel, this is not confined to the period chronologically after the abduction.

The centre of Slaughterhouse 5, though, is the horrific effects of the bombing of Dresden by the Allies. Pilgrim was a POW confined in a former slaughterhouse in the city, hence the novel's title. Because the POWs happened to be underground at the time of the raid, they were among the few survivors. The biggest raid of the war, the bombing of Dresden and the firestorm that followed caused destruction and loss of life on a scale at least comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since it was entirely conventional bombs which were dropped, the survivors were spared the horrors of radiation poisoning, but it still amounts to one of the most serious military crimes of history: Dresden was not a target of any importance in the German war effort. Vonnegut's novel has come out of his reaction to this event, and it is a memorial which conveys at least some sense of the horror of what happened. That is why it is an important novel.

Joseph Heller: Catch 22 (1961)

Edition: Corgi
Review number: 236

Joseph Heller's best known novel is probably the greatest work of literature to be based around the experiences of World War II. It manages to be both hilariously funny and terribly sad. Heller makes each of the man in the USAAF flight based at Pianosa a believable individual, each of the front-line fliers responding to the stresses of the war in the air in different ways, and each of those who are in the army bureaucracy behind the lines wrapped up in the totally unimportant in their own different ways.

While the war itself provides most of the tragedy, it is the clash between the bureaucracy and the fliers that provides the comedy. This clash is exemplified by the famous Catch 22 itself, described as "the best catch there is". The medics can ground anyone who is crazy, provided that they request it; but (as fear in the face of danger is a normal human reaction), anyone who requests grounding is not crazy, so they cannot be grounded. (From a logical standpoint, it depends on an error: sanity does not purely consist of fear of danger, so it should not be the only criterion used to determine madness.)

This sort of crazy logic pervades the whole novel, so that Milo Minderbinder can make a profit selling eggs for a loss, Major Major will only see people in his office when he's out, ex-PFC Wintergreen becomes the most powerful man in Mediterranean Operations because he controls the mimeograph machine, and the pattern made by the bomb craters on the aerial photograph taken after the mission is of more concern than the military effectiveness of the bombing.

Heller manipulates the craziness of the atmosphere through the way he plays around with chronology. The events catalogued in the book are arranged in an order which makes them seem to both follow the chronology and ignore it. For example, statements in the account of event x like "this was the most fun Orr had had since y" imply that y occurred before x even though x is described first. On the other hand, the commanding officer keeps raising the number of missions a man has to fly before becoming eligible for leave back to the US, and this number increases in the order in which events are described in the book, so that it might be 45 during x and 60 during y - implying that x occurs before y.

Tragic events tend to recur, as they take an important place in the minds of the fliers - Snowden bleeding to death, the men on the raft, and so on. The absurdity with which they are surrounded makes them even more telling, and has been frequently imitated (notably in MASH).

C.S. Forester: The Ship (1943)

Edition: Penguin, 1970

Forester's wartime novel is fairly unashamedly a piece of propaganda, designed to make British readers proud of the efforts of the Navy. He spent some time sailing with the Navy in the Mediterranean, and this novel is based on what he saw.

What he has written is an account of a battle, each chapter heading being a phrase taken from the Captain's report sent to the Admiralty afterward. The novel is unusual among naval stories for the attention that it pays to the ordinary rank and file, including the commissary side (vitally important, of course, in a real war, but not very glamorous). Few stories make it out of the wardroom, let alone into the kitchen. Each person is allowed the chance to be a hero in his own way (the crew is men only at this date), from the captain to the most unreliable Ordinary Seaman.

The fact that each character (except, of course, the Italian officers on the ships that attack them) is allowed to be a hero is the reason that this book is propaganda not literature. It is intended to make those at home proud of the Navy, and to get them to work hard to further the war effort. This is why the action described is a crucial victory; this is why each man is a vital cog in a smoothly running machine. In 1943, it is necessary to have some realism in a description of a battle; Forester does not write about an action won by the heroism of one man, nor does he ignore the possibility of death, disfigurement and disability; he even allows feelings of cowardice (though these must be overcome). The book must have, for many readers, achieved its purpose, which was to encourage everyone who read it that their effort was important to the successful conclusion of the war.

C.S. Forester: The Good Shepherd (1955)

Edition: Michael Joseph, 1955
Review number: 208

C.S. Forester's tale of the Battle of the Atlantic concentrates on the personality of one man, the captain of an American destroyer acting as a convoy escort towards the end of the war. Captain Krause - known as "the Kraut" by his men - has twenty years' naval experience but little combat experience compared to the other escorts because of the late entry of the U.S. into the war; his seniority means, though, that he is in overall command.

The pressure on the convoy is less than in the earlier years of the war (as detailed in Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea), but there is still plenty of drama. Forester concentrates on his central character, and his account has more heroism and less grinding unpleasantness than Monsarrat's. Reading it shortly after The Cruel Sea makes one acutely aware of the comparative shallowness of Forester's writing, though his aims are rather different from those of the later book. However, the lighter touch and the way Krause is presented makes The Good Shepherd read like wartime propaganda.

A comparison with Forester's Hornblower novels is perhaps rather fairer, but even so The Good Shepherd does not rank with the best of these, which are the novels on which Forester's future reputation will be based. Though Hornblower has some unusual quirks of character, these do not interfere with the reader's appreciation and belief in him; Krause is not so well conceived or realised and so jars rather more. (Hornblower's oddities, of course, tend to make him more twentieth century in his outlook than his real contemporaries; Krause is made less modern by his.) His devout Protestantism is of a type particularly old-fashioned today (and it is important enough to supply the metaphor from which the title is derived: as Jesus is for Krause, so Krause and his ship are good shepherds to the convoy). It is, however, the comparative triviality of this book which really makes it inferior to The Cruel Sea.