Fatherland

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing premise, well-written.
Review: A believable reality, a what-if Hitler had won the war. The german society, with it's paranoid, secretive, all for the good of the party regime is a disturbing vision, but one that is very easy to have imagined occurring. The re-invention of history, with most of the main events, characters and buildings having a link to reality - give it a superb realism. The main characters are believable and empathetic. Love 'em or hate 'em. What starts as a police murder investigation for Herr March becomes an uncovering of his and his country's secrets and shame... and the ending will make you cry (if you're a sook like me). As he says to one person "I've spent my life working to find criminals, and now I come to the conclusion that I work for the biggest ones". A fine book, well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT NOVEL
Review: I USUALLY CAN'T GET THROUGH ANYTHING ABOUT WW2 BECAUSE IT TENDS TO BE TOO DEPRESSING. FOR SOMEONE WHO WOULD LIKE TO READ ABOUT THE WAR AND NOT GET TOO DEPRESSED THIS BOOK MAY DO THE TRICK. NOT EVERYTHING IS WAR AND MASS DEATH AND TACTICS AND SO ON. OBVIOUSLY MUCH IS SAD BUT THE BOOK IS TOO INTERESTING AND GOOD FOR U TO NOTICE IT FOR TOO LONG.

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Alternate History Novel Ever!
Review: Robert Harris' novel, 'Fatherland,' is simply brilliant. Set in a world where Germany won World War Two, 'Fatherland,' is an amazing murder mystery that will keep you guessing right up to the end. SS Sturmbannfuhrer Xavier March is assigned to the case when a body appears along the banks of the Havel. When March learns the identity of the body, a high-ranking Nazi in Poland during the war, the Gestpo order him off the case. Unwilling to stop looking for answers, March takes on the head of the Gestapo, General Globus, in an attempt to unravel a mystery that dates all the way back to World War Two. What makes this novel truly riveting is the subtle way Harris incorperates the reality we all know into the nightmare world of a victorious Nazi Germany. It's easy to see traces of Martin Cruz Smith's 'Gorky Park' in this work, the two novels are very similar, but 'Fatherland' is much more exciting. Both as a smart mystery story and a condemnation of totalitarianism this novel delivers! This is easily the best alternate history novel I have ever read!

Rating:
Summary: Unveiling and fascinating
Review: Many compare "Fatherland" to 1984. This Comparaison is right and wrong. Right, because it's a novel of a depressing system in that you have to watch your words and deeds. And wrong- because it's so real. It's not only an utopia Harris describes. It's an option. It COULD have been like that. The book uncovers the German soul witohut hurting it. The Germans in the book are human beings- no nazi killer machines. There are evil characters and good ones. But above all there's the system that won the war it should have lost. I recommend this book to all Germans who say: "I wouldn't have been a nazi". I would have been one. That's what I know after reading "Fatherland".

Rating:
Summary: A gripping novel that's hard to put down
Review: I have to admit I usually don't like reading historic novels, and so far I have only reviewed history nonfictions. But Harris' novel Fatherland is different. As the first novel by Harris, it's very well written. Basically the novel describes a criminal investigation involving the highest level of government officials in a setting in which Nazi Germany had won the war in Europe. The main character of the story, investigator Xavier March, started to investigate a body found floating in a Berlin lake, and ultimately he discovered a lot, lot more than he or anyone in postwar Nazi Germany bargained for. The novel also has some romance, a lot of suspense, and plenty of correctly written historic facts while at the same time allowing room for imagination of how postwar Nazi Germany would have looked like. Definitely a good book for readers interested in history.

Rating:
Summary: Critical success and Popular
Review: I was unimpressed with the film, but one of life's rules is that the book is almost always better than the film. This book was dignified, fascinatingly horrible yet humane.

The image of the Great Hall in Berlin is still burned into my brain and after reading a biography of Albert Speer was disturbed to find that the Hall and the Arch of victory would have been built had Hitler won.

The murder mystery plot is occaisonally impenetrable but the details of Hitler's new society are always in the background, emerging in the narrative like some dread spectre.

The ending was particularly brave. This book centred around one man's dignified struggle to find decency in a society with none.

This book left me as cold as 1984. As Orwell said, it must never be allowed to happen.

Rating:
Summary: Surprising and very believable
Review: Not usually my sort of book (once again I was drawn in by the cover!) but one that has impressed and rather surprised me.

The secret of this books' quality lies in the scarily believable world of a victorious Germany after WWII. When you pause for thought, it is one hell of a "What if..." to contemplate.

The actual story, as it follows the two leads throughout their journey, is well paced and authoritative. The intrigue is there from the very start and the excitement that builds towards the end is magnificent. I know it is a cliche, but I could not put it down once I neared the climax.

I even got the film version out afterwards, but was predictably disappointed with an effort that contained many major plot alterations and was not nearly as believable as the novel.

Go check it out, it's good.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating story
Review: Well written police novel of what could have been a chilling reality of a Europe after a German WW2 victory. If you like this book you should also read "SS-GB" by Len Deighton, which is a police novel set in a German occupied London after winning the battle of Britain.

Rating:
Summary: The Horror of the will!
Review: In 1964, after achieving domination over all but the United States, excluding parts of eastern europe that remain obstinate, the Thousand-Year Reich prepares to celebrate Der Fuhrer's 75th birthday. But it's business as usual for SS Detective Xavier March, as Deighton would say. In the short-hand traditional for publishers, March investigates a suspicious death seemingly unconnected with the fact that in 1964, Deutch Uber Alles is the rule. But March, who once drove U-Boats for the Kriegsmarine, is a hunter by habit, and refuses subtle (and not so) hints to dismiss any suspicions. While a patriot, March's hunter's instinct foster suspicions that remain, much as he had been in the war, slighlty submerged - suspicions over the fate of Germany's Jews, the seeming perpetual resistance to German rule in the occupied and distant East and the wealth of data on human morbidity provided by experimentation on political prisoners in concentration camps. Estranged from his wife and son, March is in no mood to file things away. With the help of a visiting journalist (a beautiful and plucky American, ofcourse), March's investigation takes him to darkened archives and the offices of high ranking Nazis very much alive in a fully drawn and frighfully convicing world.

"Fatherland" excels not only because of what it does, but what it doesn't. The author resists the temptation to create the post-war Nazi hegemony by detailing its conquests with anything more than subtle clues (V-3 missiles launched at NY keep America out of the war; U-Boats are now nuclear powered, hinting at German nuclear achievements parralleing America's; the complicity of non-concquered governments like those of President Joseph Kennedy, happy to lay blame for genocide firmly on the wartime Soviet regime). The biggest twist is that while established history remains a mystery, the mystery on March's agenda quickly becomes no mystery at all: the corpse (ironically identified as a founding father when his sole criminal record arises from a 1922 arrest in a beer hall in Munich) is found outside a converted schoolhouse on the Wansee. When the dead man's connection to that location stems from a meeting there of high-ranking nazi's in early 1942, historically adept readers will realize that an even more monumental crime - the crime of the century - is involved. March remains appropriately dim, creating one of the finest examples of deductive police work through investigation - Harris refuses to allow the slightest intrusion of our history into his hero's thinking. Instead, March tracks down the other famed Nazis who met suspicious ends and follows a trail that leads him to a Swiss bank. I'm not sure whether current attention to war-time mangement of Swiss banks was around when "Fatherland" debuted, in either case, Harris' treatment seems ironic, if not prescient - the accounts weren't left behind by jews and other Nazi victims, but by disloyal Germans possessed by the insane fear that (huh! ) Germany might lose the war.

Harris also avoids the urge to recreate the dark gods of the Reich and name drop (Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and most of the Discovery Channel's usual suspects are long gone.) Albert Speer doesn't appear, but the author's drawing of undivided Berlin - monumental and insecure - gives the architect more charachter than a few lines of dumb dialog. Heydrich appears, but only to add more mystery - it's never clear if his aid to March masks fear of joining the other mysteriously dead Nazis, or a subtle warning to drop the case. (Does anybody really want to get a career boost from a former SS Intelligence Chief?)

Best of all are the people who populate the vibrant Thousand-year Reich. No revisionist or apologist, Harris nevertheless seems to object to any simplified answer holding all war-times Germans culpable for the holocaust - his Germans seem not slightly cowed by fear of their regime yet honestly ignorant of their victims' fate. While a U-Boat ace in 1943, March unknowingly kept warm against the bitter North Atlantic in socks sewn with hair from dead Jews. In the 1990's, we're kept warm with our own complacency on history, and its immutability. Harris is telling us otherwise - wake up!

Rating:
Summary: An opportunity for an amazing book, lost
Review: This book, presenting a detective story in a "what if" world had the potential to be one of the greatest books of the decade, in a terrifying world where Germany had won WWII. However, Harris' writing is not compelling and it is difficult to be drawn into the book. The plot itself is not that interesting and surprising. All in all, an opportunity for a great book, lost.