In the fabulous book by Robert Harris, Javier March is an officer for the KriminalPolizei, the main interior police department for all of Germany.

It's the year 1965, and all of Europe's under a German Reich stretching from the Rhine to the Urals. Churchill and all other Nazi haters have fled to Canada, where they continue to campaign against Hitler's regime. All of Europe's population has to learn German at school, and a guerilla war is still ongoing in the Russian heartland, which Germany conquered by 1946. Preparations are underway for massive ceremonies marking Hitler's 75th birthday, to be held in Berlin.

The basics of the plot really thicken when bodies pop up all over the country, usually the victims are found dead in a riverbank. The Kriminalpolizei is ordered by the Government to end the investigations, but one officer named Xavier March, whether out of a sense of forboding, a desire for justice, or simple curiosity, continues the case on his own. He gets a companion in the form of an American newspaper reporter named Charlie Maguire, whose country is in a state of detente with the Reich.

Upon learning that all the known victims had some connection to the disappearance of 8-11 million Jews all over the continent of Europe during WWII, he begins to dig deeper. March really begins to spin out of control, and so does the world around him. Things get really complicated when March learns that the Gestapo has been alerted and has begun hunting him down...

Grammatically Fatherland is a bit dry, and doesn't have as much wit as other totalitarian novels such as Brave New World and Animal Farm. The book is quite basic on the main descriptive sentences, which mostly stress the basic facts and occasional tidbits about March's complex investigation. Harris lets most of the horrid details flow out from the characters themselves, especially on what they say and what they find out, especially when reading documents.

The character of Javier March has to be further noted here. He's a gentle father struggling to deal with an unruly son one minute, and an intimidating looking SS officer in a black coat the next. As he learns more about the Final Solution courtesy of connections between the murders and documents found in Switzerland, he begins to change visibly, becomes more human, openly starts questioning his loyalty to the Reich. Of course the Gestapo gets ticked off and goes after him, but I'll be nice and refuse to get into too much detail about that.

I can't go too much into Maguire; to me she's basically a student of German history, with March as the teacher. Even after finishing the book I'm left wondering if she was a CIA agent tring to dig dirt up on the Reich, which did happen during the Cold War.

The most powerful and gripping aspect of Fatherland isn't Xavier March, or that American reporter, or the Gestapo agents chasing them; it's the Greater Third Reich itself. Fatherland is an in-your-face dystopia like Brave New World and 1984, and no less powerful for it. You'll know how grandiose the Third Reich thought of itself right in the beginning of that book, where the tour guide gives a lecture on a huge street with massive government buildings, many bigger than the Reichstag itself, an oversized replica of the Arc de Triomphe, and a huge domed meeting place 200 meters high with room for some 130,000 people. All these buildings were designed by Albert Speer.

Along with the Grandiose buildings come the reminders that Nazi Germany is still a dictatorial regime. Black-coated guards are everywhere, Gestapo agents lurk in the shadows, and people generally go about their daily business without saying a word, for good reason. Non-Germans, especially Poles and Russians, are treated as slaves or forced laborers, just as they were during the war. One example; March arrives at an SS conference, and the first person he sees is a Polish forced laborer sweeping the sidewalk, who abruptly turns her back out of fear. When he enters and closes the door behind him, he hears Polish folk songs being muttered from the outside.

Also important are the revelations in the book of Stalin's crimes against his own people in Soviet Russia; ruins of his gulags have been preserved by the Reich for the world to see and record, along with mass graves and documented evidence of the millions he killed by a simple nod of his head. This is a classic example of victor's justice turned on its head, where victors rewrite history to suit themselves to the point that their version becomes believable.

Harris doesn't get into too much detail into how Germany won the war, since battles like Stalingrad and El Alamein happened randomly in a random place, he believes. Harris is more focused on the aftermath; a Greater Third Reich taking up what are now Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and virtually the entire Eastern half of Europe, including European Russia.

But there are factual errors too. Factuall errors are present though: The US President is Joseph Kennedy Jr (who in real life was killed in a plane explosion while on a bombing mission to Germany) who happens to be far-right. Now how could a heir to a progressive family from Massachusetts be so far-right? And how could the Beatles still be allowed to perform in a Nazi-dominated continent? How come none of the German characters have last names more than 6 words long? Still, these are trifles.

And at the end of the book is an after word of what really happened to certain elements in the story. For example, a cartload of painting that Herman Goering stole and put in his private rooms, still there in the book, were actually returned to Poland, which retained its independence. With this you'll really be relieved that Hitler's nightmare world was never implemented. But the similarly bloodthirsty Soviet Union, which Hitler tried hard to destroy, did survive for another five decades after World War II, and played a violent role in the Cold War before finally ceasing to exist, and I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Recommended: Yes