Thunder on the Left: Some Religio-Philosophical Essays. [Hardcover]

 

 

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Stealing Thunder is a book with a very clever underlying plot. It is based on a number of interesting historical incidents that it ties together to create an interesting conclusion. It has the perfect plot for this type of historical thriller.

The problem that this thriller shares with most books of its genre is that its characters are cardboard and we really don't care about them. The historical sections about Klaus Fuchs, the historical Anglo-German atomic bomb spy, are actually quite interesting and helped this reader to understand what was behind his betrayal of the Allies. The modern sections based on an Anglo-American investigative reporter hired by an attractive German reporter were not very interesting. The action was as tepid as the romance. The fictional characters did not seem real and did not interest me. It would have been a much stronger book if it had just been a historical fiction about Klaus Fuchs, but unfortunately it wasn't. Richard Harris, author of Fatherland and Enigma, does the same sort of thing much more effectively.

Never mind the millennium. The 1999-2000 season is also the 50th anniversary of the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, the German born Los Alamos physicist who passed on critical pieces of information about the atomic bomb design to the Russians, and apparently single-handedly created the cold war's balance of terror. I say apparently because that has been the official view since 1950. What Peter Millar suggests in Stealing Thunder is that it may not have been so single-handed. Peter Millar writes with the journalist's eye for detail and much of the fun in this book comes from the incidental observations on history and biography and culture that bring these eerie events into focus. For instance the book opens with the Los Alamos scientists and ground crew positioning themselves around ground zero, some taking Edward Teller's suggestion and lathering up with sun tan lotion in preparation for the brightest man-made light that any of them would ever see. If the event were held today in the same spot it is easy to imagine a circle of Winnebagos and lawn chairs, their occupants spreading on the number 50 sunscreen, ready for a good view of the apocalypse. Such is our inability to understand orders of magnitude. Millar spins a very credible yarn, weaving together detail with speculation to produce a cloth which is both fiction and nonfiction. The story proceeds from the ficitonal present to the known past in a series of flashbacks as Millar's alter ego, journalist Eammonn Burke and his cohort and love interest, Sabine Kotzke uncover the layers of truth surrounding Klaus Fuchs. Funded by a lot of German Marks and pursued by a sniper, Eammonn and Sabine follow up on leads provided by an enigmatic diary produced by Fuchs in the last years of his life before a mysterious death. Had he been murdered by East Germany's secret police, the Stasi? If so, why? Even a decade after the Los Alamos project did he still know too much? If so, what? The trail leads from London to Los Alamos to Moscow to Iceland to Bavaria down sleazy back alleys with which Millar seems genuinely familiar. He sets the scene with an economy of description. His snapshot image of Moscow, for instance, is a capitol that smells of warm, wet dog. Having visited Moscow some years ago and worn the winter headgear I was amused to discover that was also my lasting impression of the place. On the down side, the fictional drama of Eammonn and Sabine taking place in the foreground of the present at times seems to overwhelm the real historic drama going on in the background. That, however, may be the bias of a reader who prefers history to Hollywood. These days most of us get our history from dramatized accounts, and when Millar is filling in the gaps in the historical record he is at his best. Who knows what Niels Bohr or Robert Oppenheimer might have said to Klaus Fuchs, sounding him out on his views about the deadly knot that was being tied by a handful of men, but Millar makes the conversation seem quite plausible. Plausible also is Klaus Fuchs baffled German reaction to Oppenheimer's emergence from a window seat coffin at the end of a Los Alamos production of Arsenic and Old Lace. In fact, it is Millar's understanding of the comic subtleties (or lack thereof) in the German mind, that makes his portraits of the historic Fuchs and the fictional Sabine so believable. In some ways Peter Millar's Stealing Thunder is like Oliver Stone's JFK in that it attempts to do too much, to weave together all the known evidence into a blanket conspiracy. But for those who enjoy hearing the evidence and are comfortable with drawing their own conclusions, it may be the perfect format. Don't be surprised then if Millar has you looking at the 1947 Roswell UFO incident from an entirely new perspective. As India and Pakistan begin the nuclear dance that has so preoccupied Russia and the West for fifty years, it is an excellent time to read up on how it all got started and Peter Millar's book Stealing Thunder is an excellent place to start.

This is a very well researched book with lots of little sub stories tugged in. I liked that the characters were multi-dimensional: no bad guy to kill so that the good can prevail. Being German it was interesting to read how people from other countries might see you. Defininetively not the stuff for hollywood although this could make a great movie. The story takes you from London to New Mexico, Moscow, Iceland and Bavaria. I liked the place descriptions and the feelings of the characters come across very good. Get it!

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5.0 out of 5 stars A great page turner....
Los Alamos is back in the news at the centre of the latest Chinese spying scandal. Peter Millar, with a ready eye to a good story, exploits our fascination with the race to build... Read more

Published on Mar 16 1999

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