This is a spy
thriller, set in late 1941 when Germany seemed to be winning WW2,
even as Japan joined it. However, Rory Clements quietly creates a
contrast between everyday life in Britain, where there is some
hardship and quite a lot of danger, but if you’ve got your ration
coupons you get your fair share of the necessities of life -even a
Christmas lunch- and NAZI Germany, where the necessities of life are
in short supply and those in privileged positions (invariably as a
consequence of their standing with the NAZI Party and powerful
factions within it) have considerably more than their fair share and
those people who don’t know anyone in power are already suffering,
even as Germany seems to be militarily triumphant. Clements does not
labour the point, but he does provide the inquiring millennial reader
with the information they need to understand how the apparently
all-powerful NAZIs came to lose the war: they did not, at any stage,
look after the people upon whose shoulders their wartime economy
depended. The economy failed, as it had done for the Confederacy in
the American Civil War, for essentially the same reasons: slave
labour from the occupied countries was indeed employed, but even
treatment of the native German non-slaves was only superficially
better under the NAZIs.
(A warning here for
Britain in 2020: if we continue to tolerate ever-increasing levels of
modern slavery, we will not prosper and we will not deserve to. Look
at the Confederacy and NAZI Germany for a moment!)
That is the
background of the book, the foreground highlights the other defining
vice of National Socialist Germany’s political elite, which was
factionalism and endless plotting and scheming. Hitler actually
accepted and even welcomed that his ministers would scheme against
each other: he saw this as the politics of the wolf-pack, where the
fittest wolves would rise to the top. This may work for wolves and
hyenas but in human affairs it has a uniform tendency to select the
worst humans possible for the leadership. What defines a successful
human is NOT what defines a successful wolf, but even wolves have a
caring side. The NAZIs (and some other more current national creeds
with socialist characteristics ) had an ideological aversion to
caring.
NAZI ministers in
this tale range from Todt (intelligent and likeable, even impressive,
but still in charge of the slave labour system), through Goring (vain
and scheming) to Borman (utterly despicable.) It’s all about
self-gratification and self-interest. In the forest of treachery and
danger which they create, an innocent and vulnerable person has to
survive.
This is a thriller
in the sense that shocks and plot twists keep coming at the reader,
and if the book has a major flaw, it is that this begins to feel a
bit relentless at times.
One minor flaw is
that a small German naval vessel is referred to, by German
characters as an “E-boat” (a generic allied term for any
form of combat-capable enemy launch or speedboat, including Italian
ones.) For the record, what is being referred to is an “S-boot”
and the Royal Navy used this term when those reporting a sighting
could identify it as such, because one had to react to an S-boot
somewhat differently from a larger but slower R-boot intended for
roles such as escort or minelaying rather than attack.
A more significant
error is that the hero, a sort of deniable field agent working for
both MI6 and the nearest thing the Americans had to an equivalent in
1941, is not only told that key information comes from “BP” or
Bletchley Park, but he already knows that this is involves
codebreaking! No field agent
was told about Bletchley Park in any way, and nobody who had somehow
found out would have been sent into occupied territory, let alone
sent there on
a desperate mission with a significant risk of capture.
In
general, though, this
is a good novel.
