Robert Harris - Fatherland

Author : Robert Harris (1957 - )

Title : Fatherland (1992, 377 pages)

Genre : Murder-Mystery (Alternate History)

Rating : B+

This Month I Read...

Robert Harris is a British novelist, with five published books to his credit. The first, and evidently his most famous, is Fatherland.

The plot is fairly standard forMurder-Mystery. A high-ranking political official is slain, and a low-level, disillusioned police detective doggedly strives to solve the crime.

What's To Like...

What makes this book so unique is the underlying Alternate History involved. Fatherland is set in 1964, 20 years after Nazi Germany won World War 2, and on the eve of The Fuehrer's 75th birthday.

England has been turned into a puppet state; and the US appears to be an implacable rival (in this timeline, the US still defeated Japan). The rest of western Europe (with the exception of Switzerland) is part of the greater German Empire., as is Poland and the European portion of Russia. The latter may have lost WW2 in 1943, but it still exists east of the Urals, and is engaged in a never-ending guerilla war there, supported by American arms.

Robert Harris paints a believable picture of life as it would have been in a victorious Nazi world. It is a terrifying combination of George Orwell's 1984; and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The hero, Xavier March, runs into increasing resistance and ill-will from the authorities as he continues an investigation into a murder that nobody in the upper echelons of the Nazi government wants solved.

The plot is good; the ending is somewhat unexpected; and there are no dull spots in the book. What more could you ask for?

What's Not To Like...
Some feel that the characters are stereotyped, and I think that's a valid assertion.

Others find it unbelievable that the "secret" that Xavier March uncovers (that the German government exterminated the Jews), would have stayed covered up for 20+ years. Personally, my read of the "secret" here is that the US knew about the Holocaust, and had a wink-wink relationship with Germany to not reveal this truth.

Oh Brave New World, That Has Such People In It...
Given the immense and lasting popularity of dystopic works like Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, Ape And Essence (my personal favorite Aldous Huxley novel), and Fahrenheit 451; why is it that no new best-sellers in this genre have been written? All of those books are from when, the 1940's and maybe early 1950's?

Yes, we have the Alt History genre now. But the works I've read in AH (Stirling, Turtledove, and Flint) are mostly action stories set in another timeline. The Dystopia genre seems to not have any major additions to it in more than half a century. Why? I can't believe that all the good 1984-ish ideas have been used up.

But I digress. Fatherland is a good story, with a superbly intriguing setting. The characters may be stereotypical, but your focus will be on the Alt-Hist, with all of its horrors, and you'll keep turning the pages to gain more insight into that alternate dimension.