Works as both thriller and alternate history

Fatherland
Robert Harris
HarperTorch, 1993

What if Nazi Germany had won the European war? What would the world of the 1960s look like with an aging Führer still clutching the reigns of power? Those are the big questions that inform journalist and author Robert Harris' debut novel, a genuine page-turner about one German policeman's investigation of a routine corpse who turns out to be anything but routine.

I really enjoyed this novel on many levels. For one thing, it is a compelling thriller involving long-buried secrets, political assassinations, international intrigue, and Gestapo tactics and police state paranoia. The main protagonist, Sturmbahnnführer Xavier March, a surprisingly sympathetic SS officer-by-default whose loyalty to the Reich is far from perfect, finds himself drawn into a web of treachery involving a 20-year old secret that unknown parties will kill to protect.

Fatherland is also ingeniously crafted alternate history, in which Albert Speer's larger-than-life architectural visions for Nazi Berlin have been brought to fruition. Descriptions of the titanic Arch of Triumph (40 or so times bigger than the Parisian monument of the same name) and the thousand-foot tall Great Hall vied for my attention against chilling details about everyday life in a racist police state. And of course, there is that decades-old secret March unravels; it has something to do with obscure frontier towns called Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Dachau.

All in all, a well written debut novel that is well worth a read.

(This review was originally written on September 14, 2007.)

Gripping, disturbing, chilling--you'll look at the strangers around you in a new way

Carrion Comfort
Dan Simmons
Grand Central Publishing, 1990

How horrifying would it be to find someone else in that most intimate of "places," your own mind, using you as a marionette, steering you to commit senseless acts of violence as an absolutely helpless pawn in their sociopathic schemes? That is the central, chillingly effective premise of the epic second novel by award-winning author Dan Simmons. Ranging from a concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Poland to the genteel Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina, to the racially charged streets of Philadelphia to a private island off the Atlantic coast, this near-900-page chiller deftly covers an equally extensive expanse of literary territory, including elements of science fiction, supernatural horror, psychological thriller, and international espionage.

If I could summarize the plot in one paragraph, it would be as follows. Our world is populated by a vanishingly small population of psychic "vampires," individuals who can enter the mind of others to control their thoughts and actions. These creatures are sociopaths, amoral monsters who casually foment violence, commit mental and physical rape, and destroy lives in order to play their "games." Three such vampires, old colleagues in sociopathology, have decided to end their decades-long game with one another by attempting mutual homicide, using (of course) innocent bystanders as their weapons. The resulting mass murder brings together our protagonists---a psychiatrist and survivor of the Chelmno death camp, a young black college student whose father was a victim of the vampires, and a Southern sheriff whose demeanor belies a keen intelligence. Over the course of 850+ pages, these characters uncover a sinister cabal of "vampires" whose games seem to be leading toward the ultimate finale---destruction of the world itself.

At almost 900 pages (have I mentioned how long the book is?), Carrion Comfort could be a daunting, even boring, read in the hands of a lesser talent, and yet Dan Simmons is able to pull it off with aplomb. His use of various side characters, subplots, multiple points of view, and unexpected twists, along with an ever-climbing bodycount of innocent puppets, keeps the readers interest through the very last page. Most chilling, perhaps, are the first-person musings of Miz Melanie Fuller, a Southern belle "vampire" whose obsessions with scripture, race, and propriety exist side-by-side with her callous disregard for the lives of all the pawns she uses and discards.

I had the opportunity to do dinner with Dan Simmons a decade ago and found him to be a charming man with a warm, open manner. It amazes me that a story so profoundly dark and chilling could come from a person so engaging. I guess that goes to show that Simmons is great at what he does. Whether writing award-winning fantasy, horror, science fiction, or thrillers, he always seems to be at the top of his game, and Carrion Comfort is no exception.

(This review was originally written on August 17, 2007.)

Not your run of the mill comic book

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History is at once the autobiographical tale of an American baby boomer trying to get to know his Holocaust-survivor father and of that father's experiences in and survival of the Holocaust. Spiegelman's audacity in attempting to use a "child's art form" to discuss one of history's greatest atrocities is matched only by the skill, both as a writer and a graphic artist, with which he accomplishes this goal. This groundbreaking graphic novel is definitely deserving of the accolades it has received.

In Maus, Spiegelman has demonstrated that comics and cartoons cannot be automatically relegated to the literary ghetto of the Sunday papers. This novel also proves true the old adage that pictures are worth thousands of words. Consider, for example, the cut-away view of the hidden bunker (p. 86) which graphically (in every sense of the term) shows the lengths to which Jews and other untermenschen had to go to hide from the Third Reich. Maus is successful not only in terms of its artwork, but also in terms of the stories that it tells. Spiegelman manages to show not only how the evils of the Holocaust unfolded and shaped his father, his late mother, and his new step-mother, but also how those same events shaped the relationship between Vladek Spiegelman and his son Art thirty years later.

At the risk of admitting my aesthetic thick-headedness, I still don't understand why Spiegelman chose to use animals instead of people in this work. Perhaps it is because, as some have suggested, seeing Nazis and Jews as animals allows the reader to drop the mind-stopping question of how humans could treat one another in such inconceivably barbarous ways. Perhaps the use of mice for Jews and cats for Nazis is an allusion to the old phrase about playing cat and mouse, or maybe it is a symbol of the Nazi perception of Jews as vermin. I tend to think Spiegelman's use of mice refers to his father's comment that maybe Artie will grow up to be like that famous cartoonist, "what's his name." After all, "what's his name" became famous through his cartoon mouse character, so why shouldn't Art Spiegelman? Whatever his reasons for the interesting choice to use animals as people, it works.

(This review was originally written on July 11, 2007.)