Conspiracy is "how things operate".
This, anyway, is the starting point of Chris Petits The
Human Pool, and he puts up a convincing case with his tale of
ageing WWII spooksboth sideswho find their stories not
yet over when one of their former, and indeed dead, associates
makes an unexpected reappearance on a TV news report. The central
character is old Joe Hoover, former OSS but far from past it, who
finds himself teamed with a young reporter investigating the
resurgence of fascism in Germany, and particularly neo-Nazi links
to human trafficking. Together they find that history, like the
not-so-late Willi Schmidt, is not as buried as it might be.
And thats as much as its worth
synopsising, because what follows is not only fiendishly complex,
its consistently fascinating, and it would be a shame to
misrepresent it. Petits targets might sound large and soft,
but in fact hes turning over stones not normally disturbed
in genre fiction, which must make this, for instance, not a
comfortable read if youre Swiss. It works though, and what
makes it work is the way Petit delves beneath well documented
evils to examine the "business-as-usual" attitude
underlying genocide; the bureaucratic mindlessness of what was
allowed to happen, and the excruciating moral vacuum, masquerading
as pragmatism, that oversaw its end: "The war was already
lost. The immediate task was to preserve German assets." What
gives this scene its punch is who the protagonists are: "Men
who shouldnt be in rooms together: Allen Dulles and Heinrich
Himmler."
So the cold war is hammered out even as
the hot one is cooling, but meanwhile a few concessions to a new
order have to be made: "the new trick will be the far harder
one of how we made the Jew not disappear." These are
grubby corners, but Petit doesnt flinch from what he finds
there. His thesis is that the concentration camps of the second
world war have never gone awaythat money looted from the
dead the Nazis left is funding horrors in the here and now. The
form he uses, the multiple viewpoint, is a difficult one to pull
off, but he handles it well, and doesnt need the apology of
his foreword ("I find my own writing starting to impersonate
his"): Hoovers voice, particularly, seemed authentic to
me. If the ending is arguably over the top, that doesnt stop
it being terrifying. This is a fine book, in many ways a
remarkable one, and well worth anybodys time.
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