Fatherland (Hardcover)

The story takes off on a tangent in which Hitler makes peace with Britain in 1941 or 1942 and later withdraws from France and the Low Countries in favor of his primary goal: "Drang nach Osten". Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and the western heartland of Russia are conquered by the Wehrmacht. Leningrad and Moscow are taken. After the so-called "peace treaty" the British Crown and loyalists flee to Canada, as do DeGaulle and the French loyalists. North America is the only refuge for a non-socialist/non-fascist free Libertarian ideology which resists totalitarianism. Freedom of the Press still exists in the USA, in this version of 1964.

The Beatles are performing in Hamburg, but they are a bunch of decadent English drug-using musicians from Liverpool. Their music uses savage Negro rhythms. The Jews were relocated to the east, to work camps in eastern Germany and Poland. There was much turmoil in those early years (1940-1945). Who cares, anyway? That's all ancient history.

Anyway... if you want to read and think at the same time, this one is a good one.

I thought that perhaps the alternate history component of the novel--namely, that Germany won World War II--would be a larger part of the story; however, the murder mystery actually has its origins in the 1930s, during the rise to power of Hitler. As March uncovers clues spanning three decades--the action takes place in the mid 1960s--one feels linked not only to the story itself, but the days of a horrible past gone by.

One such clue is a series of diary entries by a visitor to one of the concentration camps the Germany ran to destroy the Jews. The reading of the diary sneaks up on the listener and suddenly the listener is aware that this novel isn't just fiction, but contains a chilling historical account of the life and death of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust by Nazi Germany.

Toward the end of the novel one genuinely wants Marsh and his investigative reporting American ally to succeed in their efforts to uncover the conspiracy and bring the truth to the world. If they succeed it would bring this alternate history closer to reality--in that the real world knows what actually happened to the Jews, that they had not just "disappeared" as this alternate world believes.

The running time of this audio abridgement is three hours. I wish it had run longer as I was hooked into the plot and characters by the novel's end.

I highly recommended this story, but for mature listeners only. This story contains foul language (in English and German!), as well as graphic descriptions of violence and death.