Reviews

The Report

In March, 1943, 713 civilians of the East End of London, mainly women and children, were asphyxiated to death on a small stairwell leading to the Bethnal Green Tube shelter.  The air raid siren had gone off, but, ironically, no bombs fell that night. 

The event was so traumatic that it was years before anyone spoke of it. “The official report,” according to a story in a February, 2008 edition of the UK’s Daily Mail “was simply that a woman had tripped with a baby and others had fallen on top of her.”  A private investigation was conducted by Magistrate Laurence Dunne; the government suppressed his report of it until after the war, and the incident was largely forgotten until a recent successful campaign to erect a plaque commemorating the disaster.

From these small threads of fact, Jessica Francis Kane has woven “The Report,” a compelling first novel written in lean, lucid prose.  Crafting sharp individual voices from the beleaguered community of Bethnal Green, Kane follows their actions on the night of the event and deftly portrays their subsequent anguish and confusion. “The Report” reads like a Greek tragedy in which the chorus plays the role of the protagonist, its tragic flaw a collective exhaustion, fear, and impatience from years of bombing and scarcity.

What happened?  There was a loud explosion, which frightened people into pushing.  Or else, there wasn’t, and they hadn’t.  A flashlight was on.  A bulb was out.  There was only one entrance.  There was no center rail.  There were few injured. Most either died or survived.  It is the gift of Kane’s skill as a storyteller that she can maintain suspense in the face of a foregone, tragic conclusion.  The reader presses on, like the crowd, to get to the bottom of things.

The magistrate questions witnesses and survivors:  a constable, a warden, a clerk charged with sorting and gathering the buttons and pins and pocket change pulled from the bodies of the dead, a nurse, a beleaguered mother, her young daughter, shelter volunteers and the parish priest all contribute their individual voices to the story.  In flash-forwards, we find Magistrate Dunne being interviewed thirty years later by a filmmaker producing a documentary about the event.

But talking to him was like talking to any young person about the war years:  they spoke from a background of black-and-white pictures, while your memories were very much in color.  They asked about the rationing, while you saw coupons.  They spoke about the public morale, when what you remembered were the faces.  Try as they might, they heard only a chord or two, while the whole symphony still roared in your head.

The Report
Jessica Francis Kane
Novel, Graywolf Press, 2011
240 pages

Breaking the Code

This gorgeously designed book presents several stories: that of the by-now familiar WWII letters home, the secrets from the past, and parent-child experience, and the wounded veteran. There is more than one code to be broken here.

Murray Fisher’s concerns as he leaves for the war in medias res — he attended boot camp in April 1944 — are mundane and typical: will he lose his job at the railroad after the war to a woman who has replaced him for the duration? How to allocate his pay to refurbish the cars he holds so dear, the Cord, the Fiat, the Buick? A tinkerer with an inventive mind, Murray is discovered while in training to possess a talent with telegraphy. He is tested out and taught, seemingly as busywork, the Japanese code in Katakana.

The Fishers are great letter writers and retainers of ephemera. It is partly this which enabled the gorgeous design and even the very existence of Breaking the Code. They seem to have retained not only every letter the prolific Murray wrote, but all photos and documents such as church programs, driver’s licenses and menus. They are also fortunate in that they are a close and long-lived family.

Murray was sworn to secrecy and this, combined with the passage of 60 years, and PTSD, means that he requires some help to recover his wartime experience. The help comes in the form of his daughter, the author, and their regular meetings as she questions what she has transcribed that week from his 400 pages of letters home.  Both the young and the modern-day Murray seem slightly ashamed of his comparatively safe on-call desk job, his leisure time in now-paradisiacal Hawaii, the fact the he saw no real duty: “A very invigorating existence. Spend rest of time browsing around ships service, drinking Nesbit orange pop, visiting tent library and reading and writing letters. I may have to resort to building model airplanes soon.”

While Murray spent the duration on Hawaii, since he arrives when he does, the reader is spared the too-familiar, enraging, and heartbreaking story of the attack. We have read this many times before. But the code that is broken, Murray’s buried secret, serves as a stand-in for all the losses of life and in the end we are spared nothing.

This book is a touching exploration of the war of one ordinary man from one ordinary town and the effects he had on a few other men. Anyone who despite, timeworn advice, judges a book by its cover and picks up the charming Breaking the Code will not be disappointed (and will not exit dry-eyed.)

Breaking the Code: A Father’s Secret, a Daughter’s Journey, and the Question That Changed Everything
Karen Fisher-Alaniz
Memoir/Personal History, SourceBooks
336 pages

Guest reviewer: Christine Frank

 

Velva Jean Learns to Fly

While this reviewer is not particularly inclined to the folksy-Southern gal novel series, and didn’t read the initial series offering, Velva Jean Learns to Drive, this one is a charmer, a charmer with teeth: Southern hospitality and sweetened iced tea have no part here. Rather, the history of the WASP, Women Airforce Service Pilots, a criminally unheralded and rather arcane footnote to WWII history is the leading lady.

Our Velva Jean, having apparently taught herself to drive in a previous novel, the very definition of plucky, is a talented young married woman from a Waltons-like family in the mountains of North Carolina. When we meet her, she has left the mountains and the husband with some 121 1940′s dollars to make a name for herself in Nashville. Events ensue, and, in short, she learns to fly and becomes a WASP.

At the end of the tale even the most cynical 21-st century Yankee is left wanting to know what happens. This reader with today’s sensibilities will be outraged with the callous, deadly racism and sexism of “the Greatest Generation.” Yet the horror and anger is tempered, a bit, with Velva Jean’s dogged striving for a life “beyond the keep” as she strives to overcome her limitations and fight the battle for all modern women. Author Jennifer Niven subtly shows the painful path that Rosie the Riveter—or Jacqueline Cochran’s girls—paved the way for the path that the women of the 50s and 60s would have to further painfully carve.

Velva Jean is aided here by General Hap Arnold, Eddie Rickenbacker, Cornelia Fort, Count Basie, Jacqueline Cochran, and code talkers, as well as walk-ons Judge Hay of the Grand Ol’ Opry and Carole Lombard. Other stalwarts of country and blues music, Hollywood, and WWII either have walk-on parts or are major characters.

Velva Jean and her brothers manage, Zelig-like, to hint at D-Day, fly a B-29, and perform heroics on several Japanese islands. Familiar events are either alluded to or subtly larded in, such as the reactions to Pearl Harbor Day, melting down lipstick tubes for ammo shells, and the prestige of Life magazine and the huge impression that Hollywood had when movies were the only game in town. And Velva Jean herself subtly or expressly alludes to several decades of twentieth century vents.

Readers who are distracted or annoyed by recipes, lyrics, and poetry in books are advised to simply skip the pages of lyrics and lyrics-in-progress. But those who read every word won’t regret it. And they may run into them again, for if ever a book were made for eventual movement to the movies, Velva Jean Learns to Fly is it. Highly recommended.

Velva Jean Learns to Fly
Jennifer Niven
Plume, August, 2011 (paperback)
432 pages

Guest reviewer: Christine Frank

 

 

The Hannah Vogel Series by Rebecca Cantrell

“A Game of Lies,” released in July, 2011, is the both the most exciting and the latest in Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel  series,  but it is not the one you should read first.  Former Berlin police beat reporter Hannah Vogel, under her pseudonym  as Swiss travel writer Adelheid Zinsli, is covering the 1936 Olympics, while spying for the British with the help of her faux fiancé, SS interrogator Lars Lang, a complex man who seems a little too practiced in the art of deceiving those around him.  Though their public romance is a cover for their espionage work, it is obvious that Lang is in love with Hannah, though Hannah’s opportunities to reciprocate his romantic feelings are clouded by her well-placed mistrust of Lang, who shifts from tormented to tormentor all too easily.  When Hannah’s mentor in journalism dies from a mysterious poisoning before her very eyes at the Olympiad, perilous events are set in brisk motion.

But you really need to start at the beginning, with “A Trace of Smoke,” which introduces us to Hannah in the Berlin of 1931.  Hannah is checking in at the Berlin police station the Alexanderplatz, when she sees a photo of a corpse in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead that she knows all too well:  it is her younger brother, Ernst, whom she raised from childhood.  She cannot identify him to the police, not because Ernst is a popular transvestite performer in a gay nightclub (although that certainly doesn’t help) but because Hannah and Ernst have lent their identify papers to Zionist friends have used them to escape from Germany.  Hannah’s quest to learn the identify of her brother’s killer by herself is complicated by her duties covering the trial of an M-like child rapist, and by the arrival on her doorstep of Anton, a five-year-old orphan whose father “Ernst” might be Hannah’s brother, or might be Ernst’s lover, also named Ernst and head of the Sturm Abteilung – Ernst Rohm, of the S.A.

An American educated in Germany and fluent in German, Cantrell is adept in her evocation of the rise of the Reich in Berlin.  In 1931, the city is still hungry and ragged from a decade of biting economic depression; in 1936, it is plump, corrupt and menacing.  Certain friends from the first novel have grown too comfortable, by the third, with the bargains they must make with corruption in order to buy their own safety.  Each novel is augmented by a glossary of terms and author’s historical notes.  Cantrell’s research is thorough yet smoothly applied; a reader in search of an adept, friendly read in the genre of historical thriller will be hooked.

One nit:   Hannah is a terrific thriller series protagonist:  courageous, loyal, independent, stubborn and funny.  Yet it seems a bit much that nearly every man she encounters – Nazi, resister, gay or straight – lusts after her, particularly when the Nazi Party line for women was kinder, kuche, kirche and Hannah, a 32-year-old unmarried newspaper reporter with no fortune or family, would have fallen outside the ideal of an Aryan bride of the Reich.  But then, Hannah is so engaging that perhaps she can entrance these rigid-thinking men as well as she does the reader.  This is a series of mysteries that skillfully entwines historical events with morally ambiguous plot twists; these are books that wrap into their plots difficult questions of risk, sacrifice and going along to get along which seem so easy in retrospect but remains ones our society still grapples with.

A Trace of Smoke (Mystery, Forge Books, 2009)
A Night of Long Knives (Mystery, Forge Books, 2010)
A Game of Lies (Mystery, Forge Books, 2011)

“We unfortunately live in a divisive, no-holds-barred political culture in which recognition of complexity is taken for weakness and far too many people believe that on any particular issue there is only One True Story.”

The main purpose of this book, writes the author Sylvie Murray, is to invite students to think critically about historical writing itself.  Citing contemporary sources – newspaper articles, advertisement, speeches, as well as historical analysis – Murray provides rich context for them.  Divided into three parts, this guide examines how the prevailing sentiment of each period of the war affected its media, as well as how such periods were depicted and possibly distorted afterwards.  Part One, “Before Pearl Harbor,” addresses the fervent anti-interventionist policies in the United States prevalent throughout the nation before it was actually attacked.  Part Two, “Create a Will to Win,” describes the propaganda campaigns implemented to get the war machine started. Part Three, “Their World Can Never Be Known to You,” the most painful and poignant section of the book, examines the reporting from the war by Murrow and Ernie Pyle, the censorship and self-censorship of letters written by the combat soldiers (“I didn’t mean to be so morbid in this letter – but you just can’t ignore the casualties of war.”), and the challenges experienced the Japanese-Americans, African-Americans and Native Americans fighting for a nation which had traditionally marginalized them.

Although written for an academic audience (the lay person may be a bit puzzled by the peer commentary periodically interjected by Robert D. Johnston, quoted above) “A Student’s Guide to Writing World War II,” is a treasure trove of resources and information. Murray proves herself well-qualified for writing a guide to writing history.

A Student’s Guide to Writing World War II
Sylvia Murray (with commentary by Robert D. Johnston)
Reference/History, Hill and Wang, 2011
194 pages

Twelve year old Henry Lee wears a button that states “I Am Chinese.”  In 1942 Seattle, it is important to make the point that he is not Japanese, and indeed, soon the Japanese-Americans of the community – even the ones born in the United States, even the ones who speak no Japanese – are rounded up and sent off to internment camps.  Among the interned is Henry’s first sweetheart, classmate Keiko.  Many of the exiled families store their precious belongings in the basement of the Panama Hotel, which, in 1986, is being renovated as an older Henry Lee watches.  A cache of old letters found in the hotel unleashes memories of Henry’s first, bitter, sweet love and as the story progresses in chapters alternating between the past to the present, we discover the forces which drove Henry and Keiko apart.  Soaked in period atmosphere of the jazzy, divisive 1940s, this is an impressive debut.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford
Novel, Ballantine Books
285 pages