posted on 21 Nov 2019

Munich by Robert Harris

You don’t pick up a Robert Harris book expecting innovation and experimentation but he’s a master craftsman when it comes to constructing a gripping, exciting thriller. He’s also a meticulous historian of his facts and his settings – whether it’s ancient or modern – and he’s clearly very much at home when it comes to the historical moment of the Second World War. Munich like Fatherland and Enigma before it feels very much like Harris’s favourite territory despite the fact that I still think Pompeii is his best book so far and by some distance.

We perhaps associate the 1938 dash by Chamberlain to a summit in Munich in order to try and head off Hitler’s growing expansionist ambitions and so avoid a second world war as something of a humiliation. Selling the Czechs down the river was never going to stop the maniacal plans the Nazis had for world domination and Chamberlain’s famous ‘peace in our time’ bit of paper is now emblematic of the perils of appeasement.

What Harris offers us here is a chance to look again at Chamberlain and what he thought he was trying to achieve and to do so with the added element of a modest spy story that incorporates some personal and professional dilemmas amongst the background bureaucrats on all sides of the summit.

For me the spy story is much less interesting than the reconstruction of Chamberlain, so I’ll deal with that first. In Britain, Paul Legat has a less than stellar civil service career in the Prime Minister’s office and a marriage that is on the rocks. However, he has one thing that puts him central to the unfolding plot – he speaks German fluently and he was once a close friend of a parallel civil servant in Hitler’s entourage, Paul Hartmann. Hartmann also happens to be at the heart of a somewhat half-hearted secret plot to oust Hitler from power before he can drag the world into war. Hartmann and his fellow plotters see Munich as the last chance to show the other European powers just what Hitler’s real plans for Europe are before they sign away their fate by doing a deal on Czechoslovakia. So a covert meeting between Hartmann and Legat must take place on the fringes of the Munich summit and stolen papers must be passed.

What jeopardy and tension the book has comes from the playing out of this plot line as both Legat and Hartmann have to overcome jealousy, suspicion and personal relationship problems in order to make this covert tryst happen. For Hartmann the stakes are the possibility of capture and summary execution and for Legat the expectation of professional suicide. Harris is, of course, a good enough writer to make us care about both but I couldn’t help but feel that our knowledge of history and the fact of the Second World War was something of a gigantic plot spoiler.

What was somewhat more interesting for me – and which occupies the first half of the book – is the recreation of Neville Chamberlain. The public perception of him as a failed hangover from a Victorian age – his hangdog demeanour, Eden hat, umbrella and penchant for wing-collars – results in a rather cruel caricature of him as a figure of fun, a sort of humorous bookend with the self-important, cocksure strut of Hitler. But Harris is far more kind to him here. We see a man who is a dedicated, even skilled, politician who is deeply driven by a humanitarian urge to avoid war. He is essentially a man who is still scarred by a war to end all wars that happened only twenty years previously. But he’s also a vain man who enjoys adulation when it comes his way and is over-certain of his influence and abilities.

It’s a complex portrait that is fascinating in its own right and which the spy plot in the second half of the book rather pushes to one side – something I was rather sad about.

But make no mistake, this is a sure-fire page turner and one which also filled in quite a lot of historical gaps in my knowledge about the 1938 Munich summit and I always felt I was in safe hands. The acknowledgements at the end of the book reveal just how much background research Harris put into the novel’s historical veracity and I thought that perhaps he felt the weight of that research around his shoulders a bit overwhelming at times – perhaps there was just a little too many instances where the small historical facts forced their way in not because the story needed them but because they were just there to be used and he didn’t want the research wasted.

But that’s a small criticism really for a book that would make a splendid companion on any journey.

 

Terry Potter

November 2019