Monday 22 January 2024

Book Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Historical novel in which an Irish Priest seeks to outwit a senior NAZI official with a fascination for the Roman Emperor Caligula.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This sort of thing, which fictionalises real events and real people, using their real names, needs to be done with care and in this novel it is. The subject matter has been covered before, but not as well, and most treatments keep well away from the way that the NAZI official, Paul Hauptmann, placed in charge of Rome when the NAZI’s occupied it in late summer 1943, turned a museum dedicated to archaeological discoveries connected to the Roman Emperor Caligula into his own private palace, guarded by crack troops and indeed minefields. The author of this novel does not give the issue undue prominence, but he doesn’t let the reader escape knowing that there were two important mirrors in the story:

Hauptmann and the Pope both had private enclaves guarded by private armies, which they tried to hold inviolable. And the struggle between the Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty and Hauptmann in Rome and the Vatican City in the modern age could be read as a re-enactment of the relationship between the early Christian Church and Caligula, who wasn’t the only Roman Emperor to resemble the Antichrist but he could have won handsome prizes for doing so, were any to be handed out.

This isn’t prominent enough in the plot to trouble the atheistic reader in the slightest and it enhances, rather than distracts from the adventure inherent in a good man and his loyal friends taking on a very powerful man who isn’t even friends with his own wife and children and is friends with his Fuhrer only in his dreams. This is an adversary who personifies evil by standing alone, but O’Flaherty and his friends simply serve good and certainly don’t presume to personify it.

The author is well equipped to put a lot of interesting language in the mouths of his Irish characters: “rats you could saddle” and “drunk as a boiled owl” do tend to stick in the memory, but his English characters are as good and the Italian ones nearly so.

It is all about an escape line for prisoners of war who managed to slip out of their prison camps, but this only comes about because O’Flaherty is forbidden, by the Pope himself, from interfering in the inhuman way those prisons were run. That prohibition stems from the Pope’s fear that, if provoked, the NAZIs will indeed return Rome and the Vatican: the heart of Christianity as the Pope sees it, to the days of Caligula or Nero and the reign of the beast. The rift between the Pope and O’Flaherty, who recognises the Pope’s authority and understands his reasoning, comes about because O’Flaherty realises, especially after his first personal encounter with Hauptmann, that the man does not need to be provoked before he will commit the most appalling crimes!

The title comes from the promise which Jesus made to his disciples “in my Father’s house, there are many rooms” (in some translations it is “mansions” rather than rooms). The Vatican City, where O’Flaherty hides his escapees and his own activities, is a vast, crumbling and untidy collection of forgotten rooms and passages crammed into a very small geographical space. Hauptmann’s own private Arcadia is tidy, uncluttered and expansive. Order prevails, on pain of death. O’Flaherty, living and operating in his Father’s house, simply tries to muddle through and live. Their methodologies are as opposed as their beliefs.

 

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is published by Random House on the 26th of January 2024.

Saturday 13 January 2024

Book Review of Munich Wolf by Rory Clements

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(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)


An excellent murder and survival thriller set in Munich while Bavaria was still the centre of NAZI power.

The author has set several novels before, during and after WW2 and this is one of his best so far. Partly because the hero is trying to avoid heroism at all costs.

A criminal detective and a political policeman find themselves in conflict with each other even before either knows who the other is, then they are required to work with each other whilst being alert to every opportunity to destroy each other. (This really is the way NAZI Germany worked, right up to the top. Even within Hitler’s inner circle, his preferred method was to make his associates fight each other until a clear winner emerged. This selects the plan with the strongest advocate rather than the strongest plan and the chances of success dwindle with each reiteration of the challenge process.)

Neither Inspector Sebastian Wolff nor Sergeant Hans Winter have any intention of challenging the regime as such: they are both really only trying to survive but it takes a while for them to perceive each other correctly. Constant manipulation of their actions and the general situation by those so disproportionately more powerful than their actual superiors creates a storm that they can only survive by helping each other -and in a fascist State that’s actually more subversive than blowing up railway lines.

What makes this well-researched and well-written novel most interesting is quite nuanced, in that Hitler isn’t shown as holding power by being the most extreme candidate (at least, not in 1935 when the story is set); there are others in or close to the party MUCH further round the bend, but all in one particular direction or another. This story revolves around the Thule Society, but there were other factions and sects within the Party. Even in an “extreme right” party there are left and right wings and in terms of economic policy the National Socialists were actually the hard left. In such a situation, powerful individuals oppose the rival they fear the most. The left-leaning ones fear what the right-leaning ones might do and the right-leaning ones fear what the left-leanings might do. So they agree on someone who’s not clearly right or left. The problem is that the centre-standing candidate might do almost anything and he often does. Both Stalin and Hitler came to lead their respective parties through the same mechanism.

The neo-pagan murderer in this story turns out to be so deranged that the “highest authority” in Germany comes to regret trying to cover for him. This raises the unsettling idea that the Third Reich contained and could even have been led by such a person rather than Hitler. There was potential for evil beyond even the Holocaust.


Munich Wolf by Roy Clements is published by Bonnier Books UK on the 18th of January 2024

Monday 1 January 2024

Book Review of the Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson

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(Book 3 of the Vinland Viking Saga.)

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is an historical novel about a clash of cultures between Norsemen (whose own culture was largely based around clashing with other cultures) and native American “Red Men” (who started without a concept of any culture which behaved in fundamentally different ways to their own). The two cultures had many things in common: family, clan and “tribe” meant pretty much the same things and whilst nationhood meant nothing to the Red Men, it didn’t really register on the Norse list of priorities either: the two Norse leaders (“helmsmen”) in the story may piously hope for some sort of reward from the King of Norway for claiming “Vinland” for him, but at no point does either behave as if the King might hold them accountable for their treacherous and violent conduct in pursuit of his favour. In this lies the explanation for why Norsemen ventured both far (Vinland) and near (Scotland) for people and lands to exploit and conquer: they were far too dangerous to each other to make remaining quietly at home a sustainable lifestyle choice.

The Red Men, though, having no previous experience of men with different measures of honour and, more especially, no respect for creation and straight dealing, suffer very badly for taking the Norsemen on trust in the expectation that they will act in good faith. (Although, part of the trouble is the Norse faith in an afterlife that rewards warriors more than hunters or fishermen.) Once the Red Men understand that they have been cheated and played for fools, their anger is great and so is their determination to punish the Norse, but Norse culture is based on the need to WIN the sort of conflict which Red Men can hardly believe is happening.

The Bjorn of this story has a Norse mother and has been brought up by a Red Man stepfather. This gives him a foot in both camps (there’s a remarkably expressive word in Afrikaans for this, which I decline to use here.) Bjorn spends most of the story attempting the impossible, which is to obey the honour codes of both cultures at the same time, and he’s also struggling against his own inadequacies in that not only is he dwarfed by the human factors which are in conflict: he’s also pretty inconsequential in the face of natural forces which the Red Men have to interact with for so much of their lives that they don’t have much to spare time in which to fight other men.

Only when everything goes wrong and all Bjorn can do is save his own life and that of his wife by doing a deal with the man he hates the most, does he realise that the forces in conflict between nature, Red Men and Norsemen are so great that living long enough to go somewhere else and try something else is not only the best that he can do: it’s the only salvation for any of the protagonists still alive at that point.


This is a good read, but it’s not a quick nor an easy read.


The Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson was published by Harper Collins (One More Chapter) on the 1st of December 2023.