The Man in the Bunker - Rory Clements

 It is the summer of 1945.   The war in Europe has ended and Professor Tom Wilde of Cambridge University is looking forward to his first term of teaching in what seems like years.   But for spies like him, the war never ends.   His friend Philip Eaton persuades him to undertake one last mission.   Is Hitler really dead, and if not, where is he?

Eaton takes him round the various survivors of the Berlin Bunker who are now in England.  Then it's off to the American sector of Berlin where Wilde is teamed with Mozes Heck, a Dutch Jew, raised in Germany, now a lietenant in the British Army.   All of Heck's family died in the Holocaust.   Thus Heck is on something of a crusade.

The fluctuating relationship between the two adopted Brits, the American professor and the Dutch avenger, is what gives the novel its tension.   The trail eventually leads them to the Tyrol where the fallen Fuhrer may be hiding and where a second Fuhrer is definitely on the rise.   The eventual showdown is well done and Clements leaves us with sufficient untied ends to anticipate the next in the series.

A niche subgenre of Oxbridge spies and Nazis has emerged over the last decades and Rory Clements was one of the first.   He remains one of the best and I always enjoy his Wilde series.   You can start reading them at any point - I certainly did. 

Mercury Rising - Robert Edric

 Edric is one of the best, least famous contemporary British novelists.  He is well published - Doubleday and Penguin - and well reviewed, but not adequately promoted.  I found his London Satyr by chance (reviewed on this blog) and have been on the lookout for more ever since.

Mercury Falling from 2018 is another minutely characterised story - the story of Jimmy Devlin (29), dishonourably discharged from the army at the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, who has spent the last nine years on the tramp around his birthplace in the Fens.  Fenland always floods but the floods of 1953-4 have been the worst in memory.  Homes inundated, farms too wet to work.

We start with Jimmy being evicted from one such farm which he rented with the vague idea of becoming self-supporting.  He finds work as a casual labourer on a government drainage scheme, lodgings with Ray Duggan, a farmer with a sideline in scrap, not necessarily legally acquired.  He gradually involves Jimmy in his illicit business, which involves working with the Maguire family, gypsies who spend the winter repairing fairground equipment, building holiday camps, and (inevitably) stealing stuff.

Jimmy's life settles for a while.  He re-establishes contact with his sister, and tries to avoid her husband.  But his transgressions start to catch up with him.  He tries to settle scores, finds there are too many.  The police become involved.  Jimmy is a gunman on the run...

It is masterfully done - one not especially likeable man's inexorable fate rolls out against a sodden, almost alien background.  All utterly believable.  Edric asks the question, how hard was it for the unskilled conscripts kicked out of the army en masse in 1945?  Conscripts with skills, like my father, for instance, were kept on, promoted, their skills enhanced, so they were demobbed into a more settled economy with prospects.  But for the Jimmy Devlins?

If you haven't already come across Robert Edric, I recommend you seek him out.

Istanbul Passage - Joseph Kanon

Joseph Kanon is like Alan Furst, one of the US writers of grown-up wartime espionage novels. I like them greatly but they don't seem to do so well in the UK market. They definitely deserve to be better known. Perhaps the problem is that they are so similar in style in subject. Perhaps together they achieve bestseller status on this side of the Atlantic.


It will surprise no one to learn that this, Kanon's sixth novel (the immediate precursor to Leaving Berlin, which I reviewed here) is set in Istanbul. It is 1945 and loyalties are in a state of flux. Russia, so recently a US ally, is now the enemy, more so than Germany at any rate. Turkey is seeking a relationship with both superpowers, the surviving Jews are trying to get to Palestine, and the Balkans are by and large up for grabs. Some Balkan states sided with the Nazis, others opposed. Romania tried to out-Nazi the Nazis, the only occupied country to set up its own concentration camps. It is a Romanian Nazi, Alexei, who is passing through Istanbul on his way to the US.


Leon Bauer, a US tobacco executive who dabbles in espionage, is given the job of picking Alexei up and passing him up the line. The pick up is by the Bosporus, late at night. Someone attacks. Leon shoots back - and kills the guy who told him to collect Alexei. This is a great start to a novel. What happens now? Well for starters Leon is put in charge of the investigation. At the reception after the funeral he meets an embassy wife (the embassy being in the capital, Ankara, not Istanbul which only has a consulate) and the begin a guilty affair.


Leon's wife, Anna, is in a nursing home. She has not communicated or reacted since a boatload of her fellow Jews which she had arranged was sunk. Leon's friend Mihai, who was with him at the pick up, is a Romanian Jew, the last person on earth willing to help him get Alexei out of the country.
This is how spy novels should be - deal and counter-deal, shifting priorities, nuanced compromises. There is action but not too much. Yet Kanon can keep our attention for four hundred pages by just piling the pressure onto Leon. The final twist is excellent, the setting - Galata Bridge, joining Europe and Asia - just brilliant. Nothing is as it seems. Everybody is betraying somebody.


Kanon's style takes some getting used to - short, ungrammatical sentences - and it works best in the high-tension passages. One section, a party in the residence of the former harem girl Lily, goes on far too long. It's an important passage, even crucial, but Kanon really needed to divide it up. How long does he think the reader is going to read in one go? I tend to read in half-hour bursts. Three sessions to read one episode (he doesn't do chapters) is frankly two too many. These are minor quibbles though. The characterisation is very good, the plot brilliant, and the research - as ever - faultless.

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Perhaps the ultimate classic of left-wing English literature in the Twentieth Century, Animal Farm deserves re-reading at various stages in life.  I read it at school, enjoyed it, but didn’t really get the allusions.  I’ve re-read it now, as I approach one of life’s later milestones.  I get the references now, pretty well all of them, and I still enjoy the book at its surface level.  As a child I probably identified with either Boxer the hero-carthorse, or Snowball the renegade porcine revolutionary.  Now I identify with Benjamin the grumpy but long-lived donkey.

What has to be remembered is that Orwell wrote his satire in 1945 when Russia was our number one ally and, incredible as it seems to us now, suffered censorship for daring the criticise the regime.  It doesn’t seem strange that he was censored because we still are (as Orwell himself said in the suppressed preface, “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that is largely voluntary); no, the incredible thing is that the silent censors were pro-Russian.  Today, of course, you can have a profitable career writing any old bollocks about Russia so long as it’s hostile.

What I really liked about this 1989 Penguin edition is that it assumes you are literate and reasonably knowledgeable.  There are, thankfully, no pompous notes or tendentious polemics from the editor.  There is an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, currently in post-mortem obscurity and probably overrated in life, but who at least understood satire and the Eastern Bloc, and a note on the text from the editor Peter Davison which I certainly found useful.  To flesh out the volume (the fable itself is only 95 pages) we have the original preface aforementioned and a further preface for the Ukrainian edition which I skipped.

The best thing about the fable is its length.  I don’t know how much Orwell re-wrote or cut; what we are left with, however, is just about perfect.  There are enough twists and turns to keep us hooked and sufficient jokes to remind us that it is, after all, a caprice.

Great fun from a good writer at his peak.  What more could we want?

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

I know, I know, everyone else on the planet has read this 20th century classic before me, but at least I made it in the end.  The story is well known.  Hopeless loser Billy Pilgrim gets captured by the Germans in the dying days of World War II and survives the bombing of Dresden (the British equivalent of the US bombing of Hiroshima) in February 1945 because he and his work gang happened to be in Slaughterhouse Number Five.  Thus far, Billy is Vonnegut himself, however the we begin with the author and his return to Dresden twenty-five years later, and from time to time the author intrudes by pointing out that it was he, the author, who said that to Billy just now.  So we know from early on that this book is going to be different.

Billy, we are told, at the beginning of Chapter Two, "has come unstuck in time."  This is because he has been abducted by Tralfamadorians, the inverted sink plunger people, who see time as a whole not as a sequence.  So some of the time Billy is on display, naked, in a Tralfamadorian zoo, with the naked porn star, Montana Wildhack, the Tralfamadorians kidnapped for him, and then the next moment he is in Dresden, or the Veteran's Hospital, or in his optometrist office, or in 1976 (nine years after the book was published) when he is a celebrated public speaker on alien abductions about to murdered, as he has always known he will be, by the guy he met on the prisoner of war train back in 1944.

The book's inventiveness never flags.  On one level it is comic, satirical, but Vonnegut never loses track of the central point, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and prisoners of war in Dresden.  Throughout the book people keep dying, each passing marked with the dispassionate phrase, "So it goes."  So when he comes to telling us that 135,000 people died in Dresden in a single night "So it goes" knocks the stuffing out of us.

A book to cherish.  I loved it.