The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard

 An odd little book, this.  It's a novella, only 128 pages in larger than usual typeface with blank pages between sections.  It certainly isn't non-fiction, yet there's no plot and barely any character development.  It has lofty literary aspirations - it won the 2017 Prix Goncourt - but for me at least the occasional literary flourishes were more off-putting than stimulating.

So what is The Order of the Day?  I suppose it's a pen-portrait of strategic moves made by various of the great powers in the build-up to World War II.  It is a collection of snapshots of those who one way or other appeased the clearly deranged Fuhrer of Germany.  The Munich appeasement by British PM Chamberlain is not one of those featured.  Instead we get a slightly earlier meeting with Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary.  Mainly it's about the Anschluss of Austria.  The sections dealing with this shameful episode are the best parts of the book, and I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the stage-managed 'welcome' - the Austrian girls all waiting expectantly while Hitler struggles to get past his own tanks, which have got stuck in mud.  There is a passage discussing how Joseph Goebbels altered the film record to make it look triumphant and how we have come to accept this version as truth even when the facts are readily available.  Framing this episode are before and after scenes showing how the great German industrialists agreed to bankroll Hitler, and how after the war they all got away with their use of slave labour.

What makes the book important is, firstly, the emotional impact Vuillard manages to get into passages like those dealing with the experience of slave labour - no more than a couple of paragraphs, yet they take your breath away.  Secondly, and I suspect this is what prompted Vuillard to write the book, the realisation that our world today is not very different.  Populist sociopaths in power around the world, tearing up consensus, human rights, human dignity, to enrich first themselves and then their capitalist backers, themselves too rich to ever be prosecuted.

In some senses The Order of the Day is an unsatisfactory read.  Overall, though, it's an essential one.