The Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany have been mentioned a great deal in American political circles of late because of the supposed similarities of repression and violence in late 1920s and throughout the 30s in Germany compared to what has been occurring in the United States recently.  On a cultural level political figures in both time periods have tried to impact society whether it is on film, changing perceptions about history, literature, religion, immigration, and ethnic-racial relationships.  These time periods lend themselves as wonderful opportunities to create historical fiction.  Today’s obsession with autocracy and the loss of democracy are subjects which in the future will soon lead to many novels, but the Weimar and Nazi periods have already been mined deeply.  A recent example is German author, Daniel Kehlmann’s latest work, THE DIRECTOR which follows other reconceived historical novels like, MEASURING THE WORLD and TYLL in which the writer bases important scenes on real life.

In his latest Kehlmann focuses the famous Austrian filmmaker, G.W. Pabst, who along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau were the major filmmakers of the Weimar era.  Pabst began his career as an actor and theater director, before becoming one of the most influential German-language filmmakers in Europe in the 1930s.  With the arrival of sound movies, he made a trilogy of films that secured his reputation: “Westfront 1918 (1930), “The Three Penny Opera (1931), and “Kameradschaft  (1931).  Pabst was planning to develop his career in Hollywood which did not work out so he left for France  when war was declared in 1939.  Finding himself trapped he was forced to return to Nazi Germany.  Under the auspices of propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbles Pabst made apolitical  films for the Nazis, forever complicating his reputation.

In Kehlmann’s novel, Pabst receives word that his mother is ailing, and he travels to Austria to visit her along with his wife and son who now witness the brutal cruelty of the Nazi regime whose Minister of Propaganda wants to enlist him to make pro-government films.  Pabst believes that he has free will and will not have to succumb to Goebbels’ persuasion, but that is a naïve belief.  The novel explores the complicated relationships and differences between “art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.”  Further, THE DIRECTOR is a parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art – and asks the question how far a person would go working with an evil taskmaster.

(Director G.W. Pabst, who briefly worked in Hollywood before returning to Austria and working with the Third Reich, inspired Daniel Kehlmann’s engrossing historical fiction)

The reader is indirectly introduced to Pabst as Kehlmann opens the novel with Franz Welzek and a friend who resided at the Abendruh Sanitorium traveling to Vienna for an interview with Hans Conrad on his “What’s New On Sunday” television program.  Since Welzek had been Pabst’s assistant director at the outset of his career it was expected that his former mentor would be a topic of conversation, but it did not go well. 

Soon Kehlmann leads us to a 1933 scene where Pabst is lounging poolside in Hollywood at a friend’s house ruminating about his idea for a film – “War Has Been Declared.”  A pair of self-assured American studio executives arrive and try to convince Pabst to direct one of their films, but he refuses stating the script is weak.  Instead, Pabst tries to persuade them to make his film, “War Has Been Declared.”  The two ignore Pabst’s request and refuse to take no for an answer, but Pabst holds to his principles and begins to realize that he does fit into Hollywood’s artistical demands.

Fast forward once again and we find Pabst trying to convince Greta Garbo, (who owes the start of her career to Pabst) to star in his new film, but she has doubts and expresses her distaste for certain male actors.  Garbo’s commentary are among the many keen observations that Kehlmann makes throughout the novel about human behavior and how unstable it is.

Pabst feelings about Hollywood are reinforced at a gathering of film directors and producers at Fred Zinneman, the producer’s house as the usual chit chat was ongoing.  Two things emerge.  First, Pabst is convinced he must leave Hollywood and return home.  Second, a guest at the party, Kuno Kramer, a Nazi supporter tries to dissuade Pabst from returning to Vienna and settle in Germany where he would have the freedom to make the films he wants.  A constant undercurrent in the novel is the treatment of Jews in Vienna as guests discuss their plight, and Pabst fears that the Nazis who will achieve Anschluss with Austria shortly will force him to make films for the government whether in Austria or Germany.

With this backdrop the author develops Pabst’s journey to agree to make films for the Nazi regime.  After arriving in Vienna, then part of the Ostmark (Eastern March) as it was referred to after the Nazis seized Austria through the Anschluss of March 1938 Pabst and his family face a conundrum as they arrive at their Dreiturn Castle in the town of Tillmitsch to visit his mother Erika who seems to be suffering from dementia.  Kehlmann introduces many unusual characters, the first of which is Karl Jenzabek and his wife Liesl and their two daughters who are the caretakers of the property.  They are a  strange family who carry on in a mysterious and abusive manner toward Erika and her family.  Pabst decides they must leave especially after enduring a supposed accident on a ladder where he is injured.  In the background Nazism permeates as Karl sees himself as an important local Nazi leader and the anti-Semitic overtones are clear as is his racist hatred of Jews (Pabst is considered half-Jewish).  Pabst’s plan had been to visit his mother, get her settled and move on to Marseilles and travel by ship to New York to renew his film career in the United States.  Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, closes the Austrian border leaving the Pabst family trapped and under Nazi suzerainty.

(Author Daniel Kehlmann)

Kehlmann’s scene construction and dialogue are curious .  When Pabst is on a ladder in his library and Jenzabek slowly moves it in a manner that creates fear resulting in the director losing his balance falling to the floor is puzzling.  When Gertrude, his wife demands that they call the police he refuses as he realizes there are no police for people like them in the Ostmark.  Other examples include Pabst’s interactions with Leni Riefenstahl who he helped begin her career in film and later would be his co-director, which she greatly resented.  Kehlmann’s portrayal of the creator of the Nazi documentary “Triumph of the Will” and Hitler favorite is incisive and reflects her true nature – a woman who did not feel the need for a co-director and things got rather testy when they worked together, to the point she even threatened him with a concentration camp visit.  Other examples reflect on the vapid nature of Nazi society as wives of government officials meet in a book group focusing on the mediocre novelist, Alfred Karrasch, which Pabst’s wife Gertrude attends and tries to gain cultural acceptance.  Lastly, there are many scenes that reflect the technical nature of making films and the role of the actors.  Interestingly, Pabst concludes that directors can be superfluous as the actors and technicians can carry on without them.

Kehlmann integrates incidents that highlight the cruelty of the Nazi regime.  A case in point is Pabst’s son, Jakob’s encounter with friends, one of which is a bully.  All are farm boys and avid Nazi believers, but Jakob comes to the realization that if you can defeat the bully, even by cheating you would be seen as a winner, and this would gain respect.  Once the incident takes place and Jakob is able to beat up his counterpart the lesson is learned.  You must always be seen as a winner, not worrying about how you won, but creating a positive perception by others no matter how you accomplish it.  This is right out of the “autocrat’s playbook” –  sounds familiar.

(Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler)

From this point on Kehlmann delves into the dilemma of collaboration with a murderous government that is on the verge of genocide.  Pabst is asked to visit the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin when he meets Joseph Goebbles who creates a moral dilemma, either making films for the government or perhaps he will be taken elsewhere.  The dialogue is fascinating as Goebbels, who is never named by the author, first wants Pabst to admit the errors of his ways and do penance for making communist propaganda and being an enemy of the German people, but he doesn’t know how because he does not believe this characterization of himself.  In their innocuous conversation Pabst finally rationalizes his decision to cooperate with Goebbels forceful requests. One of  Pabst’s film colleagues puts it as best as he can rationalizing that “once you get used to it and know the rules, you almost feel free.”  Pabst wonders if he is losing his mind and hopes to delay making a film until the war is over.  Pabst rationalizes that “maybe it’s not so important what one wants.  The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in.”  He believes in Germany he will have good scripts and high budgets and the best actors, something that did not always occur in the United States and elsewhere. 

In reality he had more creative freedom in the Third Reich than under the Hollywood studio system, but it came at a steep price casting concentration camp victims as extras in a pivotal scene.  He also collaborated with Riefenstahl on her film “Lowlands,” which used prisoners from Maxglan in Salzburg, Austria where more than 230 Sinti and Roma were kept in prison as forced laborers. In Spring 1943, they were deported to an extermination camp.  Wilzek justifies the film telling Pabst that “there’s nothing we can do; we didn’t make it happen.  We can’t keep it from happening.  It has nothing to do with us.” 

Kehlmann’s recasting Pabst’s life through historical fiction is a Faustian tale that explores how far an artist will compromise with the devil to continue to make his art.  In Pabst’s case we must wonder about his rationalizations as he is no better than Riefenstahl as he uses extras from a camp near Prague (probably Theresienstadt) in the last of the three films he made for the Nazis, “The Molander Case.”  Pabst is desperate to complete the film before the Red Army arrives.  He needs 750 extras taken from the camp to play as the audience in a concert hall.  Pabst will murmur to himself that “not a single person.  Will be harmed because of us.  No one has been…the film must be finished.”  For Pabst once again rationalizes that “his art will endure beyond any regime,”  but isn’t this a final descent into complicity?

Kehlmann states “that art might warrant moral compromises, but how far do you go?”  For the author he does not know what he might have done.  In an intellectual exercise you hope you will do the correct thing.

(Nuremberg Party Rally, 1935)

(V2 rocket)

As I wrote in my last review that evaluated Robert Harris’ most recent publication, PRECIPICE, there are few authors of historical fiction that I look forward to reading more.  I have spent many hours engrossed and entertained by his novels and never completed one without feeling totally satisfied.  PRECIPICE centers on the affair between English Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and Lady Venitia Stanley at the outset of World War I that turns into a spy novel.  Among his other novels, are ACT OF OBLIVION brilliantly reimagines one of the great manhunts in English history, the search for two men involved in the killing of Charles I. CONCLAVE which presents the politics and machinations in electing a Pope; MUNICH examines the process that led to the infamous conference that provided Adolf Hitler with the Sudetenland; FATHERLAND, an alternate history with the Nazis victorious in World War II and its implications; ARCHANGEL a novel that is built around a lost diary of Joseph Stalin; ENIGMA, the reader is transported to 1943 as the allies try to break the German code as u boats wreak havoc in the Atlantic;  AN  OFFICER AND A SPY recreates the Dreyfus Affair as a Jewish officer is accused of selling war secrets to the Germans in the 1890s; THE SECOND SLEEP, a book whose power lies in its between-the-lines warning that our embrace of the internet represents some kind of sleepwalk into oblivion; THE GHOST WRITER, a thriller of power politics, corruption and murder involving the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister; finally there are Harris’ exquisite novels that are referred to as THE CICERO TRILOGY: IMPERIUM, LUSTRUM/CONSPIRATA, DICTATOR tracking the orator’s rise and fall, and the stand alone thriller POMPEII set during the Vesuvius eruption. 

As the Second World War was reaching its conclusion in desperation Hitler and his Nazi regime resorted to unleashing its last secret weapon and the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile called the V2 first striking London on September 8, 1944.  This ushered in the missile age with supersonic, silent impacts, killing thousands, with over 500 hitting the city before the war’s end, leaving behind craters and memorials and causing devastating damage to areas of London.  The V stood for “Vergeltungswaffe,” or weapon of vengeance, and was designed to retaliate for allied bombing of German cities.  It was Hitler’s final “secret weapon,” designed to terrorize British cities. It traveled at three times the speed of sound, meaning it struck without any warning—unlike the slower V1 “doodlebugs”.  Hitler believed he could finally bomb England into submission and is referred to in the propaganda of Joseph Goebbles and other Nazi officials as the key to victory when all seemed lost.

(1931, Werner von Braun in the driver’s seat and two colleagues)

V2 is a work of historical fiction set in November 1944 that explores the German rocket program and the British efforts to stop it. The story is inspired by the true history of the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and the extraordinary work of women in the British intelligence service.   Harris was inspired to author the novel because of the work of Eileen Younghusband, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during World War II.  After reading Younghusband’s 2016 obituary in The Times, Harris was struck by her work during the war as she was sent to newly liberated Belgium to track mobile V2 launch sites.

(May 3, 1945. von Braun’s surrender to the Americans)

In V2 we are introduced to Rudi Graf, an engineer who always dreamed of building rockets and sending them to the moon.  However, during the war he wound up working alongside Wernher von Braun, a friend he had known since he was sixteen years old launching rockets across the English Channel into London.  Harris explores the moral conflict of scientists working under the Nazi regime through Graf who becomes a protégé of von Braun.  The second important character is Kay Caton-Walsh who volunteered for the Mechelen Project in late 1944, a part of a team of eight WAAFs (Women’s Auxiliary Airforce) that was dispatched to the Belgian town of Mechelen. Their mission was to use advanced mathematics and slide rules to extrapolate the parabolic curves of incoming rockets back to their points of origin.  Walsh’s goal was twofold, first she saw it as an opportunity to put some distance between herself and her affair with a superior officer, second and more importantly to work with colleagues to try and destroy the Nazi launch sites as attacks on London kept increasing.

(Mittelwerk underground V2 production facility)

The novel unwinds slowly as Harris lays the foundation of the story he is about to tell, introducing a number of important characters apart from Graf and Walsh.  The majority of characters are fictitious, but others are true historical figures who are accompanied with brief biographies.  Werner von Braun plays a major role as Harris explores the “Faustian pact” he made with his engineers, who dreamed of space flight but accepted military funding to build weapons of mass destruction.  General Hans Kammler was an SS-Obergruppenführer responsible for Nazi civil engineering projects and its top secret V-weapons program and thought nothing of shooting 500 villagers in retaliation for any resistance actions.  There are cameos by men like Heinrich Himmler and others but other impactful characters include Clarence Knowsley, part of the Defense Fighter Command who developed a plan to track the V2;  Sturmscharfuhrer Biwack of the National Socialist Leadership Office, a fanatical Nazi who is sent to Peenemunde to instill the proper loyalty for Hitler and spy on rocket engineers; Air Commander Michael Templeton in charge at the Mechelen base to locate V2 launch sites; Colonel Walter Huber, commander of the Artillery Regiment located at the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen; Barbara Colville, Walsh’s friend and fellow WAAF mate trying to determine Nazi launch sites, and a host of others.

(November 10, 1944, Aldgate section of London. Damage from V2 rocket attack)

Harris alternates chapters centering on Graf and Walsh.  Focusing on the German engineer Harris examines how the V2 was developed, transported to the launch sites, the actual launches, and his role in determining how effective the infrastructure of the rocket worked.  As the launches continued Graf begins to question his loyalty as more and more the SS began to take control of the V2 launches and eventually takes certain steps that brought him to the attention of the Gestapo.  Harris will then switch his attention to Walsh’s role in interpreting photographic intelligence from the Dutch coast where rockets were launched and her reassignment  to Mechelen to try and apply her math skills along with seven other women to determine the launch sites of the V2.

(October, 1945. British soldiers with captured V2 rocket)

Harris is well versed in the history of the V2 program and the historical events that impacted it.  For example, in October 1944 the allied Arnhem parachute landings forced the Germans to pull the V2 launchers temporarily out of the area around the Hague which put London out of range for the rockets.  Unfortunately, Operation Market Garden failed, allowing the Nazis to reoccupy the coastal strip leading to the worst month of V2 bombing of London as in the first week of November twelve rockets hit the greater area of the city, followed by thirty-five the second week, and twenty-seven the third week.  Harris portrays Nazi desperation as accidents at launch sites begin to occur as they push too hard to launch twelve rockets in a day.  The problem Harris correctly points out is that von Braum had over promised what the V2 program could deliver as he built massive factories, living quarters, and launched infrastructure that employed thousands, along with its own railroad.  Harris also introduces the Nordhausen underground factory, a significant historical detail that cost approximately 20,000 slave laborers their lives building the rockets—nearly four times more than the 2,724 people killed by the rockets themselves in Britain. 

Despite the technological brilliance, the V2 program was a strategic failure. Despite the success of the Nazi shell game moving rockets at night, shifting launchers from place to place the rockets themselves were inaccurate, expensive, and could not be fired in sufficient numbers to change the war’s outcome. 

(V1 “Doodlebug” German rocket)

Harris does a credible job reflecting on the issue of collaboration, particularly the plight of French and Belgium women who had relationships with the Germans leading to their being ostracized from their communities and being labeled as their hair was shorn.  The Vermeulen family which housed Walsh when she worked at Mechelen is another example as the parents had two sons one Arnaud who was vehemently anti-Nazi and a younger brother who fought for them.  Once they realized what was occurring and the brother returned home from the Russian front the family hid him – did that make them collaborators?

By its conclusion, the novel goes full-circle as Graf and Walsh meet as British intelligence is trying to convince von Braun and other scientists to work for them, not the Americans.  However, von Braun had worked out a plan to negotiate with the Americans, which he accomplished and was able to offer his services to the United States to build long range rockets which would culminate on the moon landing decades later.  Harris does bring up the issue of the “deals” Washington made with Nazi scientists  which the exigencies of the Cold War rationalized.*  It is a topic that could have expanded the novel and might have been quite fascinating.  However, after a slow beginning, Harris’ effort becomes increasingly interesting and is a strong addition to his works of historical fiction.

*After the war, von Braun and 1600 other German scientists and engineers were recruited by the United States as government employees in a secret program called Operation Paperclip (see Annie Jacobsen’s book of the same name).  By 1960, von Braun’s team had been absorbed by NASA.  In 1975 he received the National Medal of Science.  History is rather interesting especially when people change their loyalties to fit their own agendas.

(V2s were powered by a liquid ethanol fuel which pushed them to the edge of space)

(Henry Asquith and his long-suffering wife Margot. Much of the book relies on her accounts of the war and the pair’s relationship)

There are few purveyors of historical fiction that I await with bated breath until their next novel is published.  One such author is Robert Harris.  I have spent hours reading his novels and never completed one without feeling totally satisfied.  His last novel, ACT OF OBLIVION brilliantly reimagines one of the great manhunts in English history, the search for two men involved in the killing of Charles I.  Others include CONCLAVE which presents the politics and machinations in electing a Pope; MUNICH examines the process that led to the infamous conference that provided Adolf Hitler with the Sudetenland; FATHERLAND, an alternate history with the Nazis victorious in World War II and its implications; ARCHANGEL a novel that is built around a lost diary of Joseph Stalin; ENIGMA, the reader is transported to 1943 as the allies try to break the German code as u boats wreak havoc in the Atlantic; V2 focuses on the German missile campaign during World War II; AN  OFFICER AND A SPY recreates the Dreyfus Affair as a Jewish officer is accused of selling war secrets to the Germans in the 1890s; THE SECOND SLEEP, a book whose power lies in its between-the-lines warning that our embrace of the internet represents some kind of sleepwalk into oblivion; THE GHOST WRITER, a thriller of power politics, corruption and murder involving the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister; finally there are Harris’ exquisite novels that are referred to as THE CICERO TRILOGY: IMPERIUM, LUSTRUM/CONSPIRATA, DICTATOR tracking the orator’s rise and fall, and the stand alone thriller POMPEII set during the Vesuvius eruption. 

In his latest novel, PRECIPICE, like much of Harris’ work is based on historical fact, is set in the summer of 1914 as England and the rest of Europe are moving closer and closer to war.  The novel takes place over less than a year – from July 1914 to May 1915 and involves a twenty-six year old woman, Venitia Stanley, a clever and reckless person who belongs to upper-class bohemians and socialites called “the Coterie.”  In addition, she is having an affair with a man twice her age, English Prime Minister H. H. Asquith.  After World War I finally commenced we learn that Scotland Yard suspects the leak of top-secret documents and assigns an intelligence officer to investigate.  In constructing the novel Harris was given access to an archive of letters, telegrams and official documents in the possession of the Bonham-Carter family.  Employing these documents Harris has created a brilliant storyline about a secret love affair.

(The Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, was secretly madly in love with a woman less than half his age, Venetia Stanley)

The book is a nice blend of historical events and characters revolving around a true story.  The fictional component rests in Scotland Yard’s investigator, Paul Deemer, who is chosen to ferret out where the leaks are coming from and in so doing he is placed in the midst of Asquith and Stanley’s affair.  The love story component traces the relationship of the “lovesick” Prime Minister of England’s and Miss Stanley.  Harris integrates many letters that pass through the postal system that Deemer intercepts in addition to those that passed between the two before Scotland Yard became involved.  The issue is that for some reason Asquith conveys a great deal of strategic and command intelligence to his paramour.  What possessed him to pass along war secrets, possibly a desire to impress Stanley who he was smitten with, but as he did so he engaged in behavior that was not just reckless but downright illegal.  Amazingly, after showing top secret materials to Stanley, Asquith frequently wads them up and throws them out of the window of a car or reading documents to Stanley while going for a walk and then disposing of them in the trash.  It becomes so bad that Asquith’s attention to War Cabinet meetings and details are compromised as he reads and writes letters to Stanley while conducting the government’s war business.  A case in point is the debate in the War Cabinet to implement First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill’s use of the navy to enter the Dardanelles and attack the Ottoman Empire, a plan that was approved and resulted in the disaster at Gallipoli, and the split in the War Cabinet as to whether England should support France and Belgium.  Further Asquith discloses intelligence pertaining to the back and forth between Serbia and Austria, highlighted by the attitude of the Germans when it came to a possible war.

Harris is a master of highlighting social class inequality and the haughtiness of the Edwardian elite when dealing with wartime issues, and the document leaks.  Harris’ uses Deemer as his mouthpiece as he describes certain individuals as people who “seemed to believe themselves above the rules that applied to ordinary citizens.  Anything that might embarrass them was made to disappear.”   It is seen in the Asquith-Stanley relationship, the attitude of a number of characters, court hearings surrounding the drowning of Sir Denis Anson and William Mitchell, and the types of men who enlist to fight in 1914.  Further Harris juxtaposes the English “upper crust” with the soldiers who are off to war, and the English laboring class. 

(Edwin Montagu)

As the novel evolves familiar historical figures make their appearance.  Apart from Asquith and Churchill we meet Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister; Bonar Law, the leader of the Tory Party, Lord Herbert Kitchner, British Secretary of State for War, King George V, Lloyd George, Liberal Party politician and future Prime Minister, Captain Holt Wilson, Commander of Special Branch, Vernon Kell, head of intelligence services responsible for internal security, Edwin Samuel Montagu, a liberal politician who would go on to serve as Secretary of State for India between 1917 and 1922,Albert Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, newspaper magnate who despised Asquith, among others.

Harris’ work exhibits strong research as he is in full command of historical events particularly the diplomatic game that led to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia that led to the domino effect of countries entering World War I.  In reading Harris’ account, one might have imagined you were reading Barbara Tuchman’s seminal work, THE GUNS OF AUGUST.  As we are exposed to Asquith it becomes increasingly clear that despite the inevitability of war with Germany, his obsession with Stanley was on the top of his agenda. 

Asquith comes across as a “lovesick puppy” as he writes to Stanley three-four times a day and expects the same devotion from her.  Eventually she will grow tired of Asquith’s controlling behavior and thinking of how to extricate herself from their relationship which leads her to join the nursing corps to help English soldiers wounded in the war.  One must wonder that if Asquith was more attentive to his war responsibilities, and less concerned with his love life, the war may have been less deadly and drawn out.  Stanley comes across as more level-headed than her lover and she realizes early on that he should not be sharing wartime documents with her, going so far as trying to encourage him to stop.  Once she decides she doesn’t want to be a useless rich girl she moves to London to study nursing.  She understands how emotionally unstable Asquith has become and she fears if she breaks up the relationship for good, it could be disastrous for England and its allies.

(Winston Churchill, 1914)

Deemer is the character who should be most admired as he continues his investigation of Asquith and Stanleys’ almost hourly exchange of letters as he worries about the mismanagement of the war and its impact on his brother Fred, fighting as an infantryman in France.  Harris has Deemer and Stanley meet as the Special Branch investigator visits his brother in the London hospital in which she is training.  Deemer is an excellent investigator and figures out how to intercept the mail between Asquith and Stanley, steam open the letters and reseal them so they would not realize that they had been compromised.  Further, it is through Deemer that we learn the lengths Asquith has gone to win over Stanley and the type of information he was leaking.

The novel ends suddenly because Harris is inhibited by the historical record.  The main area that I wish Harris had not shied away from were psychological insights into Asquith’s character and needs.  The novel doesn’t focus as much on the chaotic push toward war as Barbara Tuchman as it focuses more on a man’s emotional collapse who is a prime example of human frailty.  However, the real life story ended with less than a bang, but the novel kept my attention throughout, and I recommend it along with his other works.

(Prime Minister H. H. Asquith)