Fatherland

The premise of Robert Harris’ most acclaimed novel, Fatherland (1992), is an interesting thought-experiment expanded into an alternate-history crime novel. The premise? What if Germany won World War Two and controlled Europe for decades thereafter under the leadership of Adolph Hitler?

The year is 1964, and the German Nazi party presides over Europe’s The Greater German Reich with an aging Hitler still at the helm. Our guide through this world is a Berlin police detective named Xavier March who, of course, investigates crimes for the Reich while driving a Volkswagen.

The novel begins with the discovery of an old man’s corpse by Berlin’s Havel River. March is assigned the case, and watching him investigate is a total pleasure. He’s so good. The author does a great deal of world-building for the reader to understand the fictional events of WW2 and the world as it exists in the Fatherland universe. I won’t spoil anything here, but Harris really thought this through.

The mystery of the riverside corpse opens the door to other mysteries for March to solve. He’s a good, honest cop working in a paranoid system with multiple layers of secretive bureaucracy and hidden truths.

Despite the excellence of the mysteries and the protagonist, the real star of the show here is the alternative history setting. The author seems to have thought of everything in his imagining of what the world would have looked like in 1964 Europe under Hitler’s unbroken reign and how a more successful Reich would have hidden it’s atrocities from the eyes of the world.

However you read it, it’s a certainty that you’ll enjoy this paperback quite a bit. The book has sold three million copies and been translated into 25 languages. There was also a so-so HBO film adaptation starring Rutger Howard. But start with the book. Always the book. Get it HERE.