Roger Brunyate's Reviews > Fatherland

A Submariner in Berlin

Berlin, 1964. President Kennedy is about to arrive on a state visit. Meanwhile, the city bustles with preparations for the Führer's 75th birthday. Yes, Hitler. For in Harris's celebrated counterfactual novel, Germany has won the war. I came to this after reading C. J. Sansom's recent Dominion, set in a postwar Britain that has become a satellite state of a victorious Germany, and Sansom acknowledges Harris as his master. But given how much Sansom devotes to the political situation, I was surprised that Harris almost underplays it. The map of the Greater German Reich in the frontispiece shows the country extending far beyond Moscow to the East, but its other borders remain much the same. It is not until well on in the book that we get any clues about what has happened to the countries of Western Europe.

For the first half at least, this does not read like a political novel so much as a police procedural. The protagonist is Xavier March, former U-boat captain, now a detective inspector with the Berlin Kripo. Although he holds the honorary rank of SS Sturmbannführer, March is essentially a loner, an "asocial" in Party parlance, a non-joiner who follows lines but does not toe them. He reminds me very much of Arkady Renko in Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith; Harris is absolutely in Smith's league, or John Le Carré's before him. The body of an elderly man turns up in the water near Berlin's most exclusive neighborhood, and March takes the case almost by accident. But soon he finds himself tangling with people very high up in the Gestapo hierarchy, and finds himself fighting for his career and even his life, variously aided by old friends from his U-boat days and a beautiful American journalist.

Harris creates a police state that is essentially an extension of its familiar prewar form, now spared the ravages of war. But it is also a state that has been able to maintain a tight control of its secrets; most of the horrors that came to light at Nuremberg and beyond are here still shrouded in darkness. It requires a shift of imagination for the modern reader to conceive a postwar situation where, for instance, Auschwitz is no more than a name on a map. Harris manages to pull it off, partly by his carefully controlled pacing, partly by his meticulous use of real people and events, documenting much that really happened. But this is more than a brilliantly-researched book; it is also a magnificently inventive thriller and rightly the foundation of Harris's considerable reputation.