Fiction review (Pacific Northwest entry)

Like Tom, I gravitate more towards fantasy and sci-fi as an occasional escape from historical works (the usual suspects--Tolkien, Lewis' Narnia and Perelandra series, and Raymond E. Feist's numerous books), but over the last few years historical fiction has become an increasingly common sight on my nightstand. Historical fiction is very haphazard in its quality, however, so I tend to be careful. The best I have read lately are:

1. Robert Harris, Fatherland and Archangel. For those interested in Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR, these two books are downright spooky. Harris, most famous for his nonfiction study of the Hitler Diaries' forgery, also has a newer historical fiction work focused on Pompeii and the Roman Empire that I have not yet read. To me, Harris' work is the finest historical fiction available at the moment.

2. Joseph Kanon, The Good German. A murder mystery set in occupied Berlin during the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, this book captures the chaos, despair, and destruction of postwar Berlin as effectively (if not more) than many historical nonfiction works I have read (since the occupation of Germany is the subject of my dissertation, I have read quite a few of them). Kanon's use of American, British, German, and Russian characters intermingles well with his vivid descriptions of the Berlin black market, the American / Soviet competition for German rocket scientists, the successes and pitfalls of denazification, and the moral implications of the war crimes trials and of German collective guilt. My Modern Germany class will be reading this book spring, and I am excited to see how they respond to it.

3. Roch Hochhuth's The Deputy. Actually a play that opened in the early 1960s to a storm of international controversey, The Deputy was subsequently released as a book and published in numerous languages. It is a damning, yet fictional, portrayal of Pius XII's behavior towards and attitudes about Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Many contemporary historical studies of Pius XII (most notorious of these is John Cornwell's polemic Hitler's Pope) echo the condemnations put forward by Hochhuth. It is surprisingly no longer in print (or at least was not the last time I checked), but a movie version of the play was released about a year or so ago under the title Amen. Hochhuth has invented much of the plot, but it is still to me one of the most important works of historical fiction in terms of how it has helped shape contemporary perceptions of Pius XII and Catholicism as a whole.

There are more to list, but I want to take some more time to compile them. As far as historical fiction that falls short, I include the prolific Harry Turtledove on that list (more on him later).

In addition to historical fiction, I include these examples of other modern fiction that are dear to me:

1. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
2. George Orwell, Animal Farm
3. Albert Camus, The Stranger
4. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
5. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle and The Oak and the Calf

More on these (and others, including memoir literature, later)