Fatherland

"I’m a huge Robert Harris fan as well. I’ve loved most of his books. The most recent one, Act of Oblivion , is brilliant. V2 and Munich are not so great, but a lot of his stuff is fantastic. Fatherland’ s central conceit is that it takes place in Hitler’s Berlin in 1964. Hitler is 75. The 20th of April, the Fuhrer’s birthday, which is a big national celebration, is fast approaching. The novel is cast as a thriller, which is a very clever decision on Robert Harris’s part. It starts off with a body in the Havel, near a favoured island in Berlin called Schwanenwerder. It’s the body of a man called Josef Bühler. Another body is found—of Wilhelm Stuckart. The facts of these two deaths are investigated by a lone detective called Xavier March, who works for the Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo). He identifies a possible third target, who’s still alive, a guy that Robert Harris has playfully named Martin Luther. In the opening and middle stages of the investigation, the murders appear to be connected with a giant theft. During looting of Poland in 1939, where all three of these men were at the beginning of the war, they lifted vast quantities of fine art and gold. That turns out to be a red herring. In fact, there’s a much bigger secret that lies beyond it. It’s a good tale well told. As ever, his background research is brilliant. What worked, above all, for me is the way he inserts, en passant, little gems of the way things are. What happened to Churchill? What happened to the British royal family? They’re all in Canada. What happened to the Russians? The Russians have been pushed back east of the Urals. There’s still a guerrilla war going on. It’s being funded by the Americans and offers no real challenge to the Germans, who are settling into the Greater German Reich. In vast areas of the Ukraine, Germans are growing crops. America is under President Kennedy, but it’s not Jack Kennedy, it’s Joe Kennedy, who was ambassador to London, the great appeaser. The ambassador to Berlin is no other than Charles Lindbergh. Because it’s the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, there’s a celebratory concert in London, at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. There’s a playful reference to a bunch of howling Liverpudlians in a Hamburg cellar who are called the Beatles, taking the city by storm. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The background is really enticing, and the big driver of the plot is the investigation, where it leads, and what it means. There’s a bit of a problem towards the end of the investigation, but I’d be giving the plot away, so I won’t go there. It’s a very ambitious book but it’s very lightly done, and that’s the mark, in my world, of a superb writer."

"This book asks the question that many good thrillers ask: “What if … ?” The question here is: What if Hitler had won? That is such a bold and interesting concept. It is true that others writers had played with this concept before, but Robert Harris brilliantly executed it and sketches in an entire world of early 1960s Hitlerite Berlin. You have a Kennedy as president but it is Joseph Kennedy, which is a very ingenious thought about the United States with Adolf Hitler in Germany. What is so clever is that the book makes you read it as a suspense story when we already know the ending. The big twist is that there was a holocaust that involved the murder of millions of Jews, yet that is a huge secret. It is very daring that the revelation at the end is something that the reader already knows. As an example of a very well realised high-concept thriller, you don’t get much better than Fatherland. It paints a picture of a world that might have been, and that is a great achievement. Because if you see events through the eyes of a character and you buy into the internal logic of the book, then if the character doesn’t know it, that is suspense enough. So long as books like this have their own coherent internal logic, then all kinds of things are possible. In a funny way, knowing what the truth really is – for example that the holocaust did happen – gives the reader pleasure in seeing how it is being concealed. I have discovered that if you construct the internal world properly, then people will buy the action that takes place inside it."