The Hand You Couldn't Shake Off
Written: Mar 26 '07 (Updated Mar 26 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lively, complex, menacing epic of exfiltration of Nazi scientist from Germany after WWII.
Cons: Reader must prepare to remember and, possibly, rethink the period.
The Bottom Line: Highly recommend for liveliness of dialog, complexity of story, trial of human character set against destruction of war, opportunity to reflect on important values.
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| wickengel's Full Review: Joseph Kanon - The Good German |
Joseph Kanon's The Good German jumps to life in the opening and keeps you engaged straight through to the end. This is Kanon's best novel to date (see my epinions on The Prodigal Spy, Los Alamos and Alibi). The book is very different from the film, which is excellent in its own right. If you have seen the film, try to treat this novel as if it were a different work entirely.
The structure of The Good German resembles that of Kanon's earlier novel The Prodigal Spy. Here hero newsman Jake Geismar touches the shadowy world of espionage through the enigmatic shooting death of one Lieutenant Tully, who was sick on the airplane that took Jake Geismar, the Congressman and the other newsfolks to Berlin.
One feature that sets The Good German apart from Kanon's other novels is the sometimes crackling, sometimes wise-cracking and a few times wise dialog. The author brings 1940s newsfolks' banter back with such high fidelity that it seems as fresh as if you had heard it on the street today. The lively dialog is placed in stark contrast to the the "Bloody Carthage" that is Berlin just after the war.
Kanon's newshound characters "had all been at war forever, in their khakis with the round correspondent patch, even Liz Yeager, the photographer, wearing a heavy pistol on her hip, cowgirl style." Liz's photographs are critical to the plot, no less than her relationship with Jake.
Deciphering Tully's death takes Jake right into the center of the scramble to sift and winnow Nazi high tech talent to whisk away the best-of-breed (and least tainted) to work in the United States. If you don't know much about this period, please see wikipedia on Operation Paperclip. Just after the war the victorious Allies marshalled a massive effort to screen all Germans according to their participation in the war effort. Particularly evil Germans were subjected to war crimes trials, and all German males were under suspicion of complicity until cleared by process.
What comes through clearly in this book is the effect of Nazism and the war on "ordinary" German people. For example, when Jake interviews the Brandt family about Emil, we get a very vivid picture of a family divided by the factors of war amd terrified that the past will come back to devour them. And the ambiguities of performing otherwise normal activities come out in the Naumann trial scene with Renate in the dock. Not morality or amorality, but dazed confusion reigns.
So Jake proceeds with his dangerous game: "You play a shell game by elimination." At every turn, he finds broken Germans and brutal Russians. Right in the middle of the book Liz is gunned down, her camera in her hand. Death marks the path of Jake's investigation at every turn. The world Kanon evokes is beyond "noir"; its chaos is made poignant through the loose control structures meant to contain it and the human cost of secrecy and disorder.
Jake finds Lena, the woman whom he left behind, his reason for returning to Germany in the first place. Jake gains deep secrets, like Renate's chance glimpse of Lena's husband Emil Brandt, alive and under Russian control. Lena thinks Emil must be freed, so Jake and she meet Emil's jailer Sikorsky to bargain and find themselves in the middle of an elaborate Russian deception, which they match with a deception of their own--and escape.
You will be swept away by the finish of the book, but your impression of the whole will linger. The characters who have most facets are the most broken. They are humans in ruins, yet what they still cling to is a message. Through all the changes, Jake is the moral center of the book. Yet two contrasting women, Liz and Lena, bracket his story. And always in the background is Tully.
So Kanon gives us a glimpse from the inside--and chiefly through Emil Brandt's story that includes Lena and the boy Erich--of the drama of the American extraction of the German scientists. Perhaps this book is another step toward healing the internal wounds of World War II, a process that continues even today, sixty years after.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
wickengel
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Member: Wilson F. Engel III Ph.D.
Location: Nashua, NH
Reviews written: 260
Trusted by: 30 members
About Me:
Thinker, Writer, Editor, Inventor, Novelist: The Virtue of Baseball (www.puff-adder.com), Poet
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