The Kindly Ones: A Novel

"I came across this after I’d drawn up my list of five books for you. I thought, ‘I’ve got to read this.’ I didn’t know it’s nearly 1,000 pages long. It’s written by Jonathan Littell, who grew up in Paris although he’s American. It was written in French, and its original title is Les Bienveillantes (‘the welcoming ones’). I think the title in English is probably the worst title I’ve ever come across in my life. However, this book has knocked everything else I’ve ever read about the Second World War out of the park. It is just incredible. He strings together the darkest pools of darkness in that period of history from 1941 through 1945. The first atrocity is the massacre at Babi Yar, which happened just outside Kyiv in September 1941. In two days, the Germans murdered 33,000 Jews as a reprisal for compliance with the Russians, who’d left bombs all over Kyiv. I’ve written a book about that event. My wife and I have been to Kyiv, and we visited Babi Yar. I’ve read about Babi Yar, but I’ve never read anything as explicit and detailed as this. Jonathan Littell’s stroke of genius is inventing, as his central character, an SS Hauptsturmführer called Dr. Maximilien Aue. A middle-ranking and bureaucratically gifted manager, he’s assigned by the SS to keep tabs on what’s happening in Russia as the Wehrmacht pushes on and making sure the job is well done as the Einsatzgruppen move from village to town to city killing Jews and gypsies and intellectuals in their thousands. He then falls out with his bosses and ends up in Stalingrad. That battle took place between October 1942 and February 1943. I’ve written a book called Last Flight to Stalingrad , so I’ve read endless books about Stalingrad. I know the background, I know the voices, I know the taste and the smell. I thought I’d nailed it completely, and so do lots of reviewers, but then I read Littell. Mon Dieu. Aue also goes to Auschwitz . He’s assigned to various death camps to make sure they’re doing it right. He ends up on the death march west. The Germans have lost the war. The Russians are advancing, and revenge is in the air. They’re running out of everything. They’re running out of rolling stock, in terms of the railways; they’re running out of fuel, in terms of the Luftwaffe and the tanks. It’s the bleakest possible outlook. He ends up, as most of them did, a refugee in what’s left of Berlin. I’ve written a book called Katastrophe about Berlin in 1945, and again I can only shake my head in admiration at his take on that ruined city. You’ve got to have a strong stomach to read this stuff. He’s a good writer. He’s far too young to have fought in the war but he’s done his research. The book is obscene, for all kinds of reasons, but he doesn’t blink in the face of extreme horror. For what I would describe as our best interests, he takes us there. He makes it authentic. After reading all these books—40 books for one of mine, so that’s nearly 300 books—I began to realise how the whole thing holds together. Because he goes into such minute detail over 974 pages, I began to sense the way it really was and felt and tasted. It was an astonishing book to read. There are two answers to that. The first is a book called First Light by Geoffrey Wellum . He was a Spitfire pilot. He happened to go to the same school I went to. It’s beautifully written. It’s about being a Spitfire pilot over that long, hot summer of 1940. I found it compelling. And—this is another doffing of my authorial cap to Mr. Littell— The Kindly Ones reads like a nonfiction book, and that to me is a brilliant achievement. “The Blood of Others” by Graham Hurley is published by Head of Zeus on July 6th, 2023 at £20"