ART OF DARKNESS
The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville, Hodder and Stoughton February 17th 2011
It’s 1952, and the war has been over for twelve years. In the heart of Nazi Afrika, Walter Hochburg works to consolidate the Third Reich’s hold over power. The old colonial powers – France, Belgium, and in particular Britain, emasculated by its humiliating defeat at Dunkirk – are weak and ripe for the plucking and Hochburg, the architect of the Afrika Reich, is ready to move.
Burton Cole, retired mercenary and disillusioned patriot, wants nothing more than to settle on his quince farm in Suffolk with his pregnant mistress. But he is offered one last job, and it’s one he can’t resist because, if he succeeds, he will destroy the man who almost destroyed him – Walter Hochburg.
The operation begins smoothly but quickly descends into hellish chaos. Both Cole and Hochburg are forced to confront old harms as scars are re-opened and scores settled just reveal more layers of pain and resentment beneath. Cole finds himself fighting, not just for his fee, not even for his life, but for his sense of himself and everything dear to him.
On one level, Guy Saville’s debut is the stuff of airport bookstalls, action movies and computer games, but it is a lot more than that. You can read Cole as the model action hero (you can even see the plastic figurine in your mind’s eye, preposterously muscled and bristling with tiny weapons), but there are also, in him, elements of the Virgilian hero, the warrior who fights, not for the love of it, but for the world he longs to return to, his farm and his family, who is steered more by his moral compass than by blood lust. Hochburg is a monster worthy of Ian Fleming, but he is also Kurtz, made evil by the fragility of his heart. He, like his nemesis, Cole, is a fruit grower, but he puts the produce of his garden to uses of shockingly imaginative violence.
In The Afrika Reich, Saville has found the Holy Grail of the mass market novel which also features characters who are fully rounded and developed, and this goes not just for Cole and Hochburg but a splendidly motley supporting cast of Angolan women freedom fighters, broken-down sharpshooters, ex-Foreign Legionnaires, SS thugs and a man called Kepplar with bad skin and innovative methods of road building. Everyone has reasons for the actions he or she takes in the furtherance of a plot which is fiendishly complex but skilfully and carefully hung together. In all 430 pages of the novel, there isn’t a bum note or a wasted word.
The excesses of the plot also serve to invest the novel with a kind of black, deadpan humour. I’m sure the audio book will be read by someone butch and gravelly like Richard Armitage, but to my mind, it could equally well be Jack Dee. It is telling that the book’s promotional page on Facebook features a link to a very funny Alias Smith and Jones sketch which sends up cinematic clichés of Nazi generals. As with the best action movies, even though the characters stand up and the plot is breathtaking in its combination of ingenuity and plausibility, you also know you’re in cartoon territory here.
Which serves to makes the novel’s most serious point all the more forcibly. The best lies are those which contain an element of truth. Saville’s alternative history is based on meticulous research into plans for Africa which Hitler had already drawn up before the outbreak of war in 1939. As we now know, Britain came very close to surrender in 1940 and probably would have reached an accord with the Third Reich if it had not been for the intervention of Churchill.
The underlying truth, however, is both more subtle and more immediate, and lies as much in Africa’s real present as in its many imagined pasts. The novel is set largely in what is today the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo. While the savagery of Hochburg and his crew may be more elegant and aesthetically satisfying than what is actually going on in DCR today (I doubt there are parade grounds made of skulls, though Damien Hirst may yet build one) the violence that is tearing it, and other African countries, apart is an aspect of the real world brought constantly and disturbingly to mind by Saville’s fiction.
The Afrika Reich is a terrific read. Definitely one for the beach, or the long flight to get you there…or the long wait in the airport for the long flight etc. etc. But a book that may well stay with you long after you would expect to forget it. I am already looking forward to the first of two planned sequels.
…reviewed by Sarah Bower