Best Novels 2014: 3 Ways of Love and War

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Whether Walter Benjamin has universal insight into truth of civilization is subject to debate, but I think his famous sentence applies to three of my top novels for 2014.

Each of them has a plot that takes place in and around WWII. Each of them has two central characters who love one another, at least at some level. And at least one of the two characters is a German soldier. All but one of these characters is German. Many of the these characters and the supporting cast have made moral choices that we as readers should judge as barbaric.

Zone of Interest: Martin Amis

Amis, the bad boy of English fiction (now, however, middle aged), still manages to generate headlines. This year it was not so much what he did to get press but those who refused to publish his novel in Germany and France. I’m a bit flummoxed by the prohibitions by publishing houses, as in many ways this novel follows a relatively firm set of moral rules when it comes to the outcomes of the major characters.

For those who don’t know about the plot, it takes place in and around Auschwitz during and after the war. Amis, in perhaps an attempt to generate controversy, calls it a “love story.” Theodor Adorno famously said, “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” so I imagine he would not have approved of a love story between two Germans taking place within the confines of Auschwitz itself. The publishers who refused to print it would agree. I do not.



Zone of Interest is Amis’ most conventional novel; he follows the moral code of traditional 19th century novels. The central characters (with one exception) manifest enough significant flaws that they cannot in accordance with laws of moralistic fiction end up happily ever after or even happy at all. The plot mostly centers on the narrative (there are two other narrators but they are largely stock figures who act and speak accordingly), of a man who defines love as something that happens in an instant, something that lasts for years and something that may never come to fruition but has, nevertheless, led to moral growth. This love at first sight stuff to some might not be believable to some but then the character, a somewhat cynical German, Angelus ‘Golo’ Thomsen , who has ties to ties to Martin Bormann, seems to have swallowed his German Romanticism the way Emma Bovary fell, in both senses of the word, for Romantic novels as a basis for living. While the plot has been around for quite some time, Amis’ writing the book under this semiotic code is a bit of a stretch for a novelist who has not been bound by standard plots in many of his novels.

What may have appealed to Amis then was the challenge of writing a conventional novel in an unconventional setting. To me, it works. It is possible to give some of the redemptive aspects of love to someone who is intimately tied to one the most evil ideologies in human history? Should he be condemned for doing so? I don’t think so.

Amis did have a brief interlude with Auschwitz before in his much more experimental novel Time’s Arrow. This book is more in the mode of an Oulipo challenge in which the plot unfolds backward, Not just that we hear about things in reverse order but the plot literally unfolds backwards as the narrator’s mind rewinds his life from the moment of death to almost the time his birth.That novel has the feeling of an inventive experiment Zone of Interest has a few hearts shaped by Romantic fiction set in the midst of darkness.



His previous novel, also quite good, follows the path a low class lout, Lionel Asbo. a stumbling but dangerous bum who manages to rise in the world through nothing other than dumb luck, a willingness to take what is not ethically his, and willingness to participate, by the ned, in the world of greed so wonderfully satirized in Amis’ breakthrough early novel Money. Unlike his dad, Martin has embraced and promoted his bad boy image by telling tales of bad boys getting away with things. In Zone of Interest the central character, Angelus “Golo” Thomsen, is a bad boy who might have used his romanticized version of love in another zone and so have become yet another love lorn character that we would have felt nothing but sympathy for. Placing him in Auschwitz is in some ways the least risky thing Amis has done if we can accept that a character like Golo has the capacity to love, and by the end, change from a typical Nazi to someone who may earn our sympathy. I disagree with at least one critic who calls the novel a satire. Lionel Asbo is a satire, while this book shows us how characters are defined and limited by the ideologies they embrace, be it Romantic Love or Nazi Party propaganda.

The novel is a quick read with little linguistic or plot driven trickery. Amis did his homework when it comes to some of the details surrounding the camp and lets us see that hearts and minds still work, all too conveniently perhaps, even in the midst of satanic machinations and fire and ash. The female protagonist, Hannah Doll (appropriately named given the way Thomsen fits her into the Romantic code rather than trying to see her as a real person), may be the most loving and positive depiction of a character that Amis has ever attempted. He goes a bit too far toward hagiography so that her angelic light shines too brightly within the grey dark reserved for the icy lower level of the Inferno, but then we see her through mostly through Thomsen’s narration (and the words of cliché driven and Dark Lord of Auschwitz, Paul Doll, Hannah's husband, whose hateful comments make her shine all the more). Could such a character as the ironically named Angelus move our hearts? Could this Romantic fiction change the way we think too? I think this was Amis’s aim and for readers willing to enter this zone if might be worth the time to see if he succeeded.


The Undertaking: Audrey Magee

If Martin Amis takes a risk in setting a love story in Auschwitz, Audrey Magee gives us a love story that takes place during the same time period, also with two German protagonists. We follow their lives, largely apart, through the terrible events in two locations-- the eastern front and Berlin. First novels rarely get considered for the Booker Prize, but this one did.

The Undertaking, however, did not arouse controversy as Zone of Interest did, even if the two main characters whose lives unfold on every page take part in actions and moral choices that are at times damning and at others noble, if not quite heroic. While a love story with Auschwitz as a backdrop is too much for some publishers and readers, a story that examines love as an ideal and as a guiding light between two flawed Germans suffering through deprivations has been positively reviewed all across the UK, the US and other English speaking countries. There is, perhaps, more ready sympathy for the lives of those who were not in charge of anything in the war except finding food and surviving, even if doing so comes at the cost of killing civilians or kicking Jews out of their homes. Magee gives us a wonderful small portrait instead of a wide canvas to study what something as big a topic as it gets, love in the time of war. She is not interested in grand theories or explanations of what the war or the behavior of ordinary Germans meant. Sometimes, however, it is a close up that gives us insight of the big picture too.

The novel opens on a less than noble note. Peter wants to go home from the eastern front. The only way he can do so it to get married. After placing an ad, he goes through a ceremony with his drunken soldier buddies and a chaplain. Katerina is, at the same moment, in Berlin getting married to him in what might be called an early version of a virtual wedding. The German elite had thought up this option in order to get more babies born who would then grow and become part of the nation that was going to rule the world for the next thousand years. Peter gets his leave and goes to Berlin. Katerina is better looking than her picture, has a sense of humor but also has some parents that don’t think his long term plan to be a teacher mark him as a great choice. Peter and Katerina, during his short leave, manage, nevertheless, to fall in love just in time for him to return to the push that will lead to the siege of Stalingrad. He leaves behind a promise he will return and a newlywed who will soon find she is pregnant.

The remainder of the book describes what happens to each of them as the war moves from inevitable victory to the decline and fall of the Reich. As assured victory turns to defeat anything life giving rather quickly disappears. Each of them makes some terrible moral choices. The suffering they undergo afterward may be a form of punishment and it may be purgative enough for us to see them, in the end, in a redeemable light. Peter and Katrina learn how much it costs simply to survive. They have promised each other they will see one another again and raise the child that was conceived during their all too brief interlude, and it is this hope that helps them survive as the world they once knew comes to an end.

I won’t reveal all that happens other than to say that Magee has allowed these two characters (and a small cast of supporting characters) to represent that fates of many of those who lived through terrible times. Neither Peter nor Katarina are philosophical types; they don’t have interior monologues that plumb the deep meaning of things. They are instead the common German folk who have been largely voiceless in much English writing about the War. Magee does not glamorize them and that is one of the strengths of the book. They are morally flawed in ways I suspect most of us would be under similar circumstances. It is by not moralizing the protagonists, however, that lets us, as readers, enter into some level of sympathy.

In reading The Undertaking, I was reminded of Jonathan Littell’s compelling and encyclopedic novel The Kindly Ones, in part because Littell has long sections on the siege of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin. If Littell‘s comprehensive overview of the zeitgeist is symphonic, Magee’s work is a solemn duet. Both can and do both please and instruct. If I had one critique of the The Undertaking, it’s the ending. I think that the events described (and I don’t wish to give anything away) take place too quickly. I would have hoped there would have been more. If that is the most I can come up with, then I think this should encourage readers to enjoy the dark tale of two cities, two people, two forms of love—the real, which is largely impossible given the circumstances, and the virtual, which may be more useful to survival, if not happiness.



All The Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr

The third book that has its plot centered on events in and around the second world war has received the most mentions in top books listings that have come out this year. In fact, The New York Times named Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See as one of its top 10 books and many others have lavished high praise, among them William Vollman, a writer who has produced some great (and not so great) works that have depicted some characters that come from dark worlds: Vollman’s review in the NY Times almost gushes:

I must blame Anthony Doerr for lost sleep, because once I started reading his new novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” there was no putting it down. Told mostly in the present tense, in short and usually pointed chapters, the story moves briskly and efficiently toward its climactic encounter during the Allied bombing of St.-Malo, France, a couple of months after D-Day. Although the narrative consists largely of flashbacks, it’s easy to follow because it focuses most sharply on only two characters, the blind child ?Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who takes part in the French Resistance, and the very Aryan-looking Werner Pfennig, a technocratic private in the service of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Vollman, a National Book award winner, knows how to start a review and how to summarize a novel. For me, the novel follows the literary code of the bildungsroman; the plot takes us through the maturation of the two main protagonists from children to the liminal age of adulthood, using the events of the war to demonstrate their character and the changes they go through. Each is, in a different way, precocious and heroic. Each has to lose their guides in life, but in so doing come to make moral choices that we admire. They end up seeing more than most even if one is literally blind and the other cannot see through his ideological frame until late in the unfolding of events

Marie-Laure is a saintly figure, a blind child, who has come to know the sea and its small creatures better than almost anyone else on the planet. The gift of a braille edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea becomes, while she is still quite young, her sacred text. It gives her a reason for living, learning and ultimately surviving. Werner too has his own special talent. He transcends his place as an orphan because he has the ability to make what others see as junk into a working radio and from this, ultimately, to learn to be able to track the signal to its source, a useful skill when hunting members of the resistance There is more than a bit of symbolism in Werner’s name (Von Braun should echo here). The German’s were, after all ,responsible for the rockets and the technology of death that gave rise to the mechanistic efficiency of Auschwitz. Werner is just a pawn, a scrawny kid barely 18 who has a talent. He uses it and advances the cause of his country. But he suffers, as he must in a novel following conventional moral codes, for his sins.



The novel shifts back and forth between these two who we know through foreshadowing and flash forwards, are fated to meet. Both of them have grown up listening to the radio, to music and to lectures from Marie-Laure’s grandfather who conducts what might be called prequels to MOOCs. By the time the two meet many have died, a city in France is in ruins and Germany is on its way to defeat. Like The Undertaking the two protagonists spend little time in the same space, and yet it is a transformative experience for both. It is their love for words, for knowledge, for the ways voices carry and communicate that leads to enlightenment and perhaps what they themselves would call love. The novel, not surprisingly, plays with visual tropes, but is the voice, the human voice, that lets us and the characters themselves see. Voices in this book and in life always come coded (What Wittgenstein defined as a language game),there are many secrets that are passed or explored a Marie-Laure risks her life to help the Resistance by passing on coded messages while Werner spends endless hours listening to static until he finds the enemy speaking ,and then, out of the blue, the return of a voice that had brought him succor when he was a child. It is the voice that secretly broadcasts these coded signals that brings Werner to Marie-Laure.

I have yet to mention a whole subplot involving a cursed diamond, a model town built by Marie-Laure’s loving father that contains a secret, and the pursuit of the diamond by an obsessed Nazi. I found these parts of the book the weakest, but for those who want action then this helps the pages turn quickly. By the end of the novel we have heard updates on virtually all the characters who have survived the war up until a final glimpse of the saving angel and her granddaughter in 2014. She notes that each passing day those who lived through the war die off and so we come to an end of a a story that is also an end of a living testimony. Doerr writes some wonderfully beautiful prose and this combined with plot twists and characters who we would like to believe could really exist, make this book earn its ‘best of’ from the mainstream press and from me. The book has sold about a million copies and this has surprised many people including the author himself. The reason one book goes viral and another does not has something to do with the words on the page and a whole series of factors that would take deep data to capture including the unquantifiable thing called luck.


While the rest of Vollman’s review of the book is positive, he ends up saying the book is not great literature. If great means that it will be part of the literary canon, then he might be right about this, but I would say that this novel and the other two I’ve written about here could fit within a cultural studies curriculum.



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Doerr, Magee and Amis, explore a time which seems to be of interest, so to speak, now. This may due to the fact that as those who lived as adults during that time are becoming rarer on earth it is, if not quite safe, at least less forbidden, to explore minds and lives from the German side. For generations, it has been accepted practice to demonize Nazis and the Germans as a whole. Even one of the great novels of the late 20th Century, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow, makes the Nazi Blicero the epitome of the culture of death. In popular culture the evil Nazis in the Raiders of the Lost Ark series are stock characters who deserve to suffer and then die horribly.

Each of these three books gives a a partial view of main characters and times that are rounded rather than flat. None of them purports to give us the fictional “truth” of things, but taken together they form a Rashomon like series of views. Each of them are worth reading as stand alone texts, but I think giving a range of voices and approaches to this time in history will help us see and hear the range of ways that people, or at least characters, come to make meaning of their lives. If I started with one of the more famous sentences in 20th century philosophy I will end with another, written by an Austrain, Ludwig Wittgenstein: ”Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigens”. The last words of his Tractatus have been translated in various ways but I like this version: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. These books have permitted those who have not, at least in English speaking fiction, been able to speak in voices that are worth hearing.

because he has the ability to make what others see as junk into a working radio and from this, ultimately, to learn to be able to track the signal to its source, a useful skill when hunting members of the resistance There is more than a bit of symbolism in Werner’s name (Von Braun should echo here). The German’s were, after all ,responsible for the rockets and the technology of death that gave rise to the mechanistic efficiency of Auschwitz. Werner is just a pawn, a scrawny kid barely 18 who has a talent. He uses it and advances the cause of his country. But he suffers, as he must in a novel following conventional moral codes, for his sins.



The novel shifts back and forth between these two who we know through foreshadowing and flash forwards, are fated to meet. Both of them have grown up listening to the radio, to music and to lectures from Marie-Laure’s grandfather who conducts what might be called prequels to MOOCs. By the time the two meet many have died, a city in France is in ruins and Germany is on its way to defeat. Like The Undertaking the two protagonists spend little time in the same space, and yet it is a transformative experience for both. It is their love for words, for knowledge, for the ways voices carry and communicate that leads to enlightenment and perhaps what they themselves would call love. The novel, not surprisingly, plays with visual tropes, but is the voice, the human voice, that lets us and the characters themselves see. Voices in this book and in life always come coded (What Wittgenstein defined as a language game),there are many secrets that are passed or explored a Marie-Laure risks her life to help the Resistance by passing on coded messages while Werner spends endless hours listening to static until he finds the enemy speaking ,and then, out of the blue, the return of a voice that had brought him succor when he was a child. It is the voice that secretly broadcasts these coded signals that brings Werner to Marie-Laure.

I have yet to mention a whole subplot involving a cursed diamond, a model town built by Marie-Laure’s loving father that contains a secret, and the pursuit of the diamond by an obsessed Nazi. I found these parts of the book the weakest, but for those who want action then this helps the pages turn quickly. By the end of the novel we have heard updates on virtually all the characters who have survived the war up until a final glimpse of the saving angel and her granddaughter in 2014. She notes that each passing day those who lived through the war die off and so we come to an end of a a story that is also an end of a living testimony. Doerr writes some wonderfully beautiful prose and this combined with plot twists and characters who we would like to believe could really exist, make this book earn its ‘best of’ from the mainstream press and from me. The book has sold about a million copies and this has surprised many people including the author himself. The reason one book goes viral and another does not has something to do with the words on the page and a whole series of factors that would take deep data to capture including the unquantifiable thing called luck.


While the rest of Vollman’s review of the book is positive, he ends up saying the book is not great literature. If great means that it will be part of the literary canon, then he might be right about this, but I would say that this novel and the other two I’ve written about here could fit within a cultural studies curriculum.



******************************************************************************

Doerr, Magee and Amis, explore a time which seems to be of interest, so to speak, now. This may due to the fact that as those who lived as adults during that time are becoming rarer on earth it is, if not quite safe, at least less forbidden, to explore minds and lives from the German side. For generations, it has been accepted practice to demonize Nazis and the Germans as a whole. Even one of the great novels of the late 20th Century, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow, makes the Nazi Blicero the epitome of the culture of death. In popular culture the evil Nazis in the Raiders of the Lost Ark series are stock characters who deserve to suffer and then die horribly.

Each of these three books gives a a partial view of main characters and times that are rounded rather than flat. None of them purports to give us the fictional “truth” of things, but taken together they form a Rashomon like series of views. Each of them are worth reading as stand alone texts, but I think giving a range of voices and approaches to this time in history will help us see and hear the range of ways that people, or at least characters, come to make meaning of their lives. If I started with one of the more famous sentences in 20th century philosophy I will end with another, written by an Austrain, Ludwig Wittgenstein: ”Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigens”. The last words of his Tractatus have been translated in various ways but I like this version: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. These books have permitted those who have not, at least in English speaking fiction, been able to speak in voices that are worth hearing.

For those who think that the is one right approach to a topic, these three books should prove that style, detail, plot and character matter. Each has voice that opens a world, each has a way of unfolding that is unique despite similar settings. To write means to use words well whether it be on the topic of love, war, or anything else.