Fatherland
By Robert Harris
If ever a film sold a book, this would be it for me. The most obvious counterfactual to people from the western world, I would think, is to imagine the global landscape had Hitler emerged from the ruins of WW2 victorious.
That’s the premise for this book. Hitler’s creation of a glorious Reich became a reality, Germany founded in his image. It is this that Robert Harris so evocatively brings to life.
I had watched the film starting Rutger Hauer a couple of times in the 90s and found it fascinating to picture the murky 1960s under Hitler, der Führer about to turn 75 and iconic deistic figure. The world knows nothing about die Endlösung der Judenfrage and there’s a mad scramble by an American journalist to get proof of what’s happened to the US president, who is in Berlin for Hitler’s birthday celebrations.
As much as I enjoyed the film, it pales in comparison to the book. Things are stretched out in much more detail over its near 400 pages, and the depth of penetration of the thought “state then relationships” is shown in a few scenes, particularly as the protaganist’s own son turns him into the Gestapo at one point.
It’s not simply a case of waiting to get to the end, of finding out how they expose the secrets of Hitler’s policy of genocide. There’s far more intrigue running through the story, as Detective Xavier March is on the case of murders. He links things bit by bit, with the aid of an American journalist.
A brilliant touch is that as much as he hates the Gestapo, he doesn’t believe the stories about the Jews. That was a fantastic touch to me, the disbelief. To us, it’s obvious; to him, the totaliarian regime was normal though flawed, but not capable of the horrors that occurred.
I don’t feel like detailing the story too much. I reckon it’s enough to say what everybody should already know: This is a top book, brilliantly written. Great stuff.
Tags: Counterfactual, Robert Harris
August 4th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
[...] since I’d never heard of it before. I had been hunting Harris’s first work of fiction, Fatherland, on eBay when I came upon an excellent offer: That book (used) + three others by the same author [...]
August 13th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Anybody that knows us won’t be surprised to know that Radio and I aren’t in agreement about this book’s rating. Her review is here.
August 13th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Oh, I figured out what was wrong with it the other day! I was perplexed as to why there was so little emotion in it… and then I remembered that it was written by a man. It was an excellent idea for a story, but the characters were a bit too robotic and logical for it to be believable.