Fatherland

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Anthony Lejeune

Fatherland, by Robert Harris (Random House, 366 pp., $21) Rising Sun, by Michael crichton (Knopf, 355 pp. $22)

THE THRILLER, shocker, or mystery novel is a very flexible form. It can point a moral, expound an argument, convey all manner of specialist information: it can even be funny, although this is not recommended. There is, however, a great gulf between the thriller that offers incidental satisfactions while pursuing its proper purpose and the novel that, under the guise of a thriller, aims at something quite different. Publishers and literary editors tend, unfortunately, to be snobs, and pay more attention to so-called "literary novels" than to those, often much better written, books which they sideline as "genre fiction." It would make more sense if the literary novels were confined to a ghetto, since they are so plainly a minority taste. Some books do straddle the borderline--a dangerous position. Let us consider a pair of much publicized and ambitious novels which have the trappings of a thriller.

Robert Harris is described on the jacket of Fatherland as "a columnist for the London Sunday Times." In fact, he is an ex-columnist for the Sunday Times. When the Labour Party failed to win the general election this spring, he soaked his column so deep in tears that, as Oscar Wilde said about the death of Little Nell, only someone with a heart of stone could have failed to laugh: and, a few weeks later, he announced that he was giving up political journalism to concentrate on writing fiction full time.

Although Fatherland centers on a policeman investigating a murder, it is by no means non-political. I suspect that Mr. Harris would disdain to write a straightforward mystery, and for the publishers to say, as they do, that this book puts him beside John Le Carre and Lon Deighton is absurd. It belongs not even to a sub-species of the mystery genre but in a totally different category--the political fantasy or alternative-history novel. Alternative history, not possible future. The most celebrated novels of the latter kind, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and When the Kissing Had to Stop, were set, at the time of writing, in an all too possible future, against which, and against a political fashion tending toward which, the author sought to warn his readers. Father-land describes a Europe where Germany has won the Second World War, but the time is not the present or the future but 1964. Mr. Harris seems to have chosen that date because he wanted the old issues, and indeed some of the main figures, of the war still to be alive. In doing so, he renders the suspension of disbelief harder and the moral, if there is one, less clear, but not for the sake of challenging received political opinion.

The story opens on the eve of Hitler's 75th birthday, when President Kennedy is coming to Berlin for an official visit which will herald a new era of detente. Xavier March, a mildly disaffected policeman with an honorary SS rank, is called to investigate the case of an unidentified body found in the river. His discoveries, made with the help of an American lady-journalist, lead to a revelation which, rather implausibly in the circumstances, threatens the whole regime. He is doomed, naturally (this being an ambitious novel, it cannot have a happy ending), but the girl escapes, promising that she will tell all to that ultimate arbiter of truth, even in an alternative world, the New York Times.

Any book dealing with events that we know didn't happen begins under a severe disadvantage. Making it interesting, amusing, or enlightening requires considerable imagination. Such unexpectedly angled points of view are lacking here. We are told very little about the long-term effects of a settled Nazi regime, and the nearest thing to a smile comes from a passing reference to Britain's King Edward and Queen Wallis.

Tension depends on the long wait (very long: this is a big book) to learn the dark secret behind the murder. Unfortunately the revelation is predictable; it concerns an incident familiar to anyone who knows much about the history of Nazi Germany. One atrocity, intended to freeze the blood, was actually the subject of a recent episode of L.A. Law, where it was treated with a more lively sense of moral dilemma. Genuine conflicts of loyalty, and an inadequately explained motive for the almost inconceivable enormity of the Holocaust, were features of the Nazi Germany that existed: a continuation of the Nazi regime would surely have exacerbated, or possibly modified, them. Such perplexities are not addressed.

The one certainty about any alternative history is that it would have turned out differently from a mere extrapolation of known events. The unexpected always intervenes; which is what gives room for imagination. If, in the summer of 1940, Hitler had announced-and meant it--that he had no further territorial ambitions, if he had made no move to cross the Channel and had not invaded Russia, America would almost certainly never have been involved and Fortress Europe would have been impregnable. The outside world would, no doubt, have accepted the new German empire at least as readily as the world accepted Stalin's regime. How the situation might have developed is a proper enough subject. Or, leaving such profundities aside, Fatherland could, if rather oddly, have been simply a thriller. In the event, it hovers between the two. Perhaps, having abjured politics, Mr. Harris will now move into less portentous but more rewarding fields.