Fatherland, by Robert Harris
3.0 Stars
6-21-2022

A well written noir mystery that is at least partially undermined by its larger themes & world building. First the good: Robert Harris is an extremely solid mystery writer. The book is fast to read, characters are well described, and actions & motivations make sense. He is a "fair" writer, where the reader is given all of the information to understand and reason about the mystery. In particular I would single out a scene about 40% of the way through the book, where the main detective's boss's boss's boss calls the protagonist in for a quick interview about the case. And the main detective quickly lays out the evidence so far & his theories about what is going on, drawing in a number of clues & actions that have been mentioned but not really highlighted in the narrative. And it's all just very solid reasoning and deduction, where everything the main character is saying is stuff that an intelligent and professional investigator could reasonably notice and elucidate. It's just a very well written & plotted scene, in a book that is full of them. For the most part the entire book is like that, and it stands up well relative to other mystery novels.

Now to the world building. The premise of the book is that Germany partially won WWII before exhaustion & the advent of nuclear weapons forced the surviving countries into a negotiated peace. After that point Germany essentially takes the place of the Soviet Union in our timeline, so that 20 years after the war the United States and Germany are in a nuclear-enforced Cold War. And during the events of the book, relations are gradually thawing to the point of detente, and people on the diplomatic side of things have no interest in fresh atrocities being uncovered that could derail the diplomatic overtures.

Ok, that is in the book. In the real world, scholarship/propaganda around the war went through several phases. During the war Soviet atrocities were downplayed in the West since they were our allies, and then after the war the situation was reversed as Germany become our ally and the Soviets our adversary. So for that whole period Soviet atrocities were highlighted, while at least some of the German crimes were covered up. And then, finally, in the 90s, both of these countries were open & neither of them were our adversary, and so we get the fullest and most complete picture of the last 70 years. The problem is that the book was written before this final stage of scholarship, and so its understanding of the war is at least partially incomplete. In particular, the book doesn't really grapple with the full scale of Nazi Germany's crimes, e.g. they were trying to genocide not just the Jewish people but *everyone* in the Soviet Union, and Germany's strategic decisions during the war only made sense in the context of that goal. But in the book Germany has defeated Russia, and there's still tens of millions of Russians running around and causing problems as resistance fighters. And so you get this weird sort of twinning effect, where people in the book are interested in manipulating the news/scholarship/education to serve their political/diplomatic ends, but the author and the book itself is shaped by these same efforts going on in real life.

Anyway! This all just to say that the book suffers from at least a partially unsatisfactory treatment of its fictional world. It doesn't achieve what The Man in the High Castle did, and is instead a good mystery story tied to a middling setting.