humanpool

THE HUMAN POOL

Chris Petit

Scribner, £12.99hbk

Reviewed by Mike Herron


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Conspiracy is "how things operate". This, anyway, is the starting point of Chris Petit’s The Human Pool, and he puts up a convincing case with his tale of ageing WWII spooks—both sides—who 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 that’s as much as it’s worth synopsising, because what follows is not only fiendishly complex, it’s consistently fascinating, and it would be a shame to misrepresent it. Petit’s targets might sound large and soft, but in fact he’s turning over stones not normally disturbed in genre fiction, which must make this, for instance, not a comfortable read if you’re 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 shouldn’t 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 doesn’t flinch from what he finds there. His thesis is that the concentration camps of the second world war have never gone away—that 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 doesn’t need the apology of his foreword ("I find my own writing starting to impersonate his"): Hoover’s voice, particularly, seemed authentic to me. If the ending is arguably over the top, that doesn’t stop it being terrifying. This is a fine book, in many ways a remarkable one, and well worth anybody’s time.