In April 1964, the discovery of the body of an old man floating in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin sends tWritten in 1992 but more timely than ever!
In April 1964, the discovery of the body of an old man floating in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin sends the police on a dark chase that seems to be tugging on the loose threads of a tightly wound and closely guarded 50 year old conspiracy. And, to be sure, the police procedural, mystery and thriller components of Robert Harris’ FATHERLAND are well written and certainly will be enjoyed by any lover of the thriller or mystery genres. But the reality is that FATHERLAND is an alternate history. The meat of the matter and the real message is Harris’ excruciating (and excoriating) vision of daily life in a 1960s Europe in which Hitler prevailed in WW II. This is a classic dystopian novel that earns Harris a place beside the likes of Orwell and Huxley.
FATHERLAND is compelling, frightening, evocative, thought-provoking and all too possible (if not probable). Contemporary American readers who have just lived through the presidency of a hateful man whose objective to convert the USA to a neo-Nazi Fourth Reich was all too clear should read FATHERLAND carefully and ponder their near-future evolution. Anyone living in a democracy needs to carefully consider the nature of the country that their beliefs, their conduct, their morality and their votes are going to produce. It isn’t likely that Harris intended to create a scene of almost tragic irony when he wrote of an American journalist taking a German police officer to task over the issue of human rights but, now, it is what it is:
“Human rights? … The millions of Jews who vanished in the war … sorry to mention them, but we have this bourgeois notion that human beings have rights.”
Trump, ICE and DHS obviously didn’t get the memo! FATHERLAND? Highly recommended.
A plausible alternate history for the early development of the space race
Allen Steele’s V-S DAY posits a World War II Germany in which Adolf Hitler oA plausible alternate history for the early development of the space race
Allen Steele’s V-S DAY posits a World War II Germany in which Adolf Hitler orders a loyal Wernher von Braun to abandon the devastating buzz bomb and V-2 rocketry program. His new goal is to be the development of a sub-orbital piloted spacecraft (code-named Silbervogel) capable of launching from Germany, skipping across earth’s atmosphere and bombing New York City. When two French spies, embedded in the research facility in Germany, discover the plans, the race is on and a skeptical but cautious Franklin Delano Roosevelt orders American scientist Robert Goddard to launch the no-holds-barred development of a defense weapon capable of knocking Silbervogel out of the sky.
My reaction in a nutshell – the science and the plot as a possible alternative history to World War II was informative and entirely plausible given the available technology of the day; the telling of that alternate history was workmanlike, never simply pedestrian but never achieving the level of compelling; and, last but not least, the overall story was lacking in that Steele failed to explore how his specific piece of alternate history may have affected the overall outcome of the war.
Good but not great! Recommended in particular to round out the reading of those who have enjoyed Allen Steele’s sci-fi novels.
“There is no solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”
Michael Meyer’s forward to the edition I happened to read sug“There is no solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”
Michael Meyer’s forward to the edition I happened to read suggested that Sinclair Lewis “found a ready-made plot in the nervous undercurrent that accompanied the volatile politics of the period. With the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Europe and the alarming popularity of a variety of demagogues from both the left and right in the United States, there was widespread concern that the country could be taken over by a fascist dictatorship. Lewis placed these fears at the center of IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”
Modern democracy is a frail entity that must be constantly guarded, nourished, and actively renewed. This novel, while less than scintillating in the sense of being a gripping thriller, is nonetheless deeply disturbing and stomach-churning in the accuracy of its prescience, its timelessness, its realism and credibility, and its universal application in a 21st century world flirting with far right neo-fascism.
It’s difficult to believe that this was written almost a century ago and that Sinclair Lewis didn’t have a crystal ball scrying over Trump’s shoulder and watching the USA as it flirts with self destruction and the creation of the Fourth Reich – an authoritarian, neo-Nazi theocracy that will inevitably shred the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law if he is given the keys to the White House.
Consider:
“Remember when hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?”
What about Sinclair’s musing on Windrip, the eponymous demagogue who would be king?
“Yes. Nasty enough. But what I’ve got to keep remembering is that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy – oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … we had it coming.”
(Intelligent, thoughtful readers should apply this comment to today’s American culture and its misguided worship of wealth and capitalism and make a HUGE mental note that defeating Trump is not a panacea solution to the problems that currently plague the USA. It is only a necessary condition that happens to stand in first place on a lengthy list of must-dos. But I digress … )
On the nature of right-wing politics to decrease tolerance, to sew divisiveness, and to breed xenophobia:
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
And a reprise to the earlier observation, “We had it coming.”
“it becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or coup d’état; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans. The riposte to the claim “It can’t happen here” is “It already has.” ”
I’ll close my brief opinion by agreeing wholeheartedly with the opinions, “ … a vigorous antifascist tract” even if it was “not much of a novel” and the New York Times Book Review comment, “ exciting reading, even if it does nothing to advance Mr Lewis’s art as a novelist” quoted in the afterword. IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE must be considered as mandatory reading for every American alive today. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt the world’s future if it had a wider reading in modern Europe as well.
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