Philip Kerr is an
author I have been reluctant to attempt to review for some time. His Berlin
Noir trilogy cost me some hours of sleeplessness and in the end I decided to
skip a review and just be happy to have read it and therefore move it from the
pile of unread novels, my tsundoku tower, via the edge of my desk where the “to review” pile
occasionally falls over on to the typewriter and spills my pen pot across the
floor and thus causes significant risks when stumbling blindly about the room
at night too drunk to remember where my bed is or having just been jolted awake
by the boy shrieking from the next room and running asleep into walls and
doors, to the back half of my giant Ikea bookcase where novels that have been read
and have caused my self-esteem to shatter on the diamond-hard edges of someone
else’s talent currently reside, gathering dust and moisture until hitting the
mildew tipping point and becoming physically dangerous in their own right. This
awesome crew consists mainly of Will Self, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Percival
Everett, Mark Twain, Ismail Kadare and Bohumil Hrabal, but is not strictly
limited to such esteemed company. Other noteworthy residents include Carlton
Mellick III, John Connolly, Michael Marshall Smith, Dan Rhodes, Viktor Pelevin
etc., etc.
You see? As you, my
learned reader(s) will quickly divine, my problem is obvious. Such displacement
activity as listing some of my favourite authors is indicative of a degree of
trepidation about adding my critical and (I fear) ill-qualified opinion on the
author(s) in question to the general melee of criticism already thrashing about
on the web. What could I say that hasn’t been said before? Usually, in a
self-deprecating article such as this I would now list what I thought about the
book to check them against what has already been said, e.g. Chandler-esque,
story-driven, enthralling and appalling and so on etc, with some witty quip or
snide remark to position myself as above such obvious chicanery.
None of which is
currently getting to the bottom of just how I feel about this book. So, some
salient fact at this point might serve to help. Firstly, the back story: what
bigger crime to provide the backdrop for a series of crime thrillers than the
biggest crime of the 20th (and possibly 19th, 18th, 17th...) centuries?
You can’t fault Kerr, a man who claims to have watched “every
Nazi documentary there's ever been”, for taking what is often a scarily
huge elephant in the room and painting him thriller-pink.
 |
A pink elephant. Borrowed
unrepentantly from the BBC
without the kind permission
of either the BBC or
Banksy. |
Gunther’s story is
so closely intertwined with the rise and fall of the Third Reich that, as the
title suggests, borrowed as it is from Reinhold
Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer*, Gunther is drawn unwillingly into the gears of
the death machine and is spit out onto a ferry bound for Argentina with none
other than Adolf
Eichmann. Not a Nazi** himself (he takes great pains to point out he was
never a party member, never carried a card, and only met with the Nazi top
brass so he wouldn’t get shot), Gunther makes a living as a PI on the streets
of a Berlin in the grip, and in the aftermath, of history’s greatest monster.
How’s the writing? Chandler-esque would be close, Hammett-esque similarly
accurate, but altogether, judging by the way Kerr himself is portrayed in the
obliquely aforementioned Scotsman.com article
from February 29th 2008, a lot like Philip Kerr – curmudgeonly, gruff, straight
talking and probably in over his head. None of that stops him from unravelling
in this case an atrocious medical experiment covered up by a variety of
non-Nazi parties.
It’s truly gripping
stuff. Really. I can’t lavish enough praise thereupon, despite the series of
frankly ludicrous coincidences that one is expected to overlook in the mad
thrill of the narrative chase. Kerr excels in this milieu (I can’t honestly say
I can compare his children’s fiction or other writing for that matter) and at a
healthy and stately 55 years of age, let us hope that he is around long enough
to leave behind a legacy of truly superb crime fiction.
* The first
recorded version goes something like this: "Father, give us courage
to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and
the insight to know the one from the other."
** For some
interesting information on the origin of the nickname “Nazi”, see The
Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth, aka the Inkyfool. Free preview at http://blog.inkyfool.com/
(Paid link)
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