May is 'Third Reich Triumphant' Month at the PorPor Books Blog
3 / 5 Stars
'Fatherland' first was published in hardcover in 1992. This Harper Paperbacks edition (380 pp.) was issued in May, 1993.
UK author Robert Harris (b. 1957) has published a number of novels in the thriller and mystery genres, such as 'The Ghost Writer' (aka 'The Ghost') which was made into a 2010 feature film starring Ewan McGregor. 'Munich' (2017) and 'V2' (2020) are historical adventures centering on the European theater of World War Two. 'The Second Sleep' (2021) is set in a future, post-apocalyptic Britain and thus qualifies as science fiction.
In 'Fatherland,' Germany has won the Second World War by defeating Russia in 1943, the UK a year later. After devastating Japan with the A-Bomb, in 1946 the US is obliged to make peace with Germany when Hitler flies a V3 rocket over New York City, demonstrating the Third Reich's ability to strike at America from afar and the reality of mutual deterrence.
It's now April, 1964, and the only territory in Europe still resisting the Nazis is eastern Russia, where partisans, covertly supported by the US, wage a war of attrition that is draining manpower and money from the otherwise triumphant Reich. Hitler's seventy-five birthday is approaching, and the nationwide celebration will be centered in the massive Chancellery complex in downtown Berlin. Lending considerable importance to the celebration is the thawing of relations between the Reich, and the US and its President, Joseph P. Kennedy.
The protagonist of 'Fatherland' is Xavier March, a stolid, but intelligent, man in his early 40s, a veteran of the U-Boat campaign, and the Battle of the Atlantic. March is an officer in the Berlin Kriminalpolizei, or the branch of the government devoted to civilian police affairs. As the novel opens, March has been called to the grounds of the Schwanenwerder causeway in suburban Berlin. A cadet at the Sepp Dietrich Academy, out for an early morning jog, has found an elderly man's corpse in the shallow waters of the shore of Lake Havel.
March is cynical - dangerously so - about the Reich and its transformation of German society, but he is a dedicated investigator, so he is conscientious in pursuing what seems to be an unremarkable missing persons case. But it turns out that the deceased man is a former high-ranking official in the Nazi party, someone who was involved in the party from its earliest days. A man with connections to other, very influential, people.
Soon enough, there are orders from the Kriminalpolizei bureaucracy that the upper echelons of the Gestapo will handle the investigation themselves. But March is stubborn, choosing to ignore the red flags out of detestation for the Gestapo general, the loathsome Odile Globocnik. Staying one step ahead of Globocnik, March discovers that the dead man was involved in a criminal enterprise that, should word of it be exposed to the public, greatly would embarrass the Party, and the Fuhrer, on the eve of the latter's birthday.
Aided by an American journalist named Charlotte Maguire, who is in Berlin as a representative of World European Features to cover the celebration of the Fuhrer's birthday, March digs even deeper into the workings of the inner circle of the Reich. But time is running out for March, and if he fails, any chance for ending the Nazi domination of Europe fails with him.......
'Fatherland' is a Three-Star novel. It starts off as a very readable, well-plotted mystery, with a believable portrayal of Berlin as the capital of a Nazi empire, its streets overwhelmed by massive Brutalist architecture, and the heraldry of the Reich. Author Harris also is good at depicting a society steeped in the doctrines of National Socialism, where the state surveils its citizens and shows no hesitation in crushing dissent.
Where the book falters is in its Big Revelation, which I suspect most, if not all, readers will see coming well in advance. As a result, as the second half of the novel ladles out one divulgence after another, these inevitably have a perfunctory quality.
As well, the denouement, which goes on for over 50 pages, generates suspense by having the lead characters make stupid decisions, never a good tactic in composing a storyline. By the time I got to the closing chapters a tiredness was permeating the narrative, and I found the conclusion more than a little predictable.
Summing up, 'Fatherland' is a competent, is not overly imaginative, 'Hitler Wins' novel.