First book of the year: Munich By Robert Harris.
Everyone knows Churchill, not the insurance selling dog but Winston Churchill the British Prime Minister during World War 2. Not everyone may be familiar with Chamberlain though-Churchill’s predecessor.
In Munich, Robert Harris depicts the summit between Chamberlain, Hitler and Mussolini which averts but sadly only postpones the beginning of World War 2. The novel is set in 1938 and tells the happenings of the summit from the point of view of two former Oxford students. Hugh Legat and Paul Hartmann were once friends who gallivanted around 1920’s London, now they’re civil servants on either side of history.
Harris clearly admires Chamberlain very much, and paints the often-scorned appeaser of Nazi Germany as a noble, strong and cunning negotiator. Given Hitler was ready to mobilise troops to begin invading Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain done mighty well to avoid war.
Robert Harris is the type of writer that Netlix directors would love to have at their helm, he’s the king of the political thriller. Almost every sentence is a mini cliffhanger that keeps you reading just ‘one more page’.
Like any good novel there’s far more than one story playing out on the pages. The negotiations of the Munich Agreement are of course the enveloping narrative. Yet, the difficulties that arise when these two long lost friends meet again carry enough weight for a novel of their own. Never mind when both are on either side of arguably the most important negotiations the world had seen up till then.
I don’t know much about World War 2, but I do know history hasn’t treated Chamberlain too kindly for his policy of appeasement. After reading Munich, I’ve succumbed to Harris’ admiration for the man. He may have only postponed war, but the more time the world had between the two mammoth tragedies of the World War’s the better. If Chamberlain had been able to tweet his declaration of “peace for our time”, the tweet wouldn’t have aged well. Having said that, the extra time the British had to ramp up their rearmament process certainly didn’t do them any harm.
