In 1932, a scientist flipped a switch on a device without quite knowing what it would do. The device created a bunch of super-powered humans around the world, super-powered humans who are a lot like the X-Men. In Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century, we see an alternate history of the twentieth century, the way it would have played out if there had been superheroes running around the battlefields of World War II, Vietnam, and the Cold War. There’s even a cheeky cameo by one Stanley Martin Lieber.

Fogg has been “out in the cold” for years when his old partner, Oblivion. They worked for the Bureau of Superannuated Affairs during the War and now, the Old Man, needs to talk to Fogg about some unfinished matters. Being spies, Fogg and Oblivion don’t give away much. It’s a little hard to figure out what’s going on from their conversation. Thankfully, this book is composed mostly in flashbacks that take us from Fogg’s childhood to his recruitment, to World War II, and beyond. By the end of the book, we get a completely different history of an entire century. I loved this gritty retelling of history so much!

Throughout the book, as Fogg and Oblivion pop up in history, Fogg constantly wonders about what makes a hero. From 1936, each of the major powers field what they call Übermenschen or superheroes or the changed. The Germans have Schneesturm (Snow Storm) and Machertraum (Dream Maker) and Wulfmann (Wolfman). The Russians have the Red Sickle and Rusalka and Koshchei the Deathless. The Americans have Tigerman, Whirlwind, and the Green Gunman. There’s even a brilliant appearance of a super-powered Jewish Pole during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The British have their share of superheroes, but they play a different game. Where other countries send their super-powered into the field, the British watch, take notes, and wait. Fogg is constantly told not to interfere, which goes against his instincts to save lives. His orders to stay out of sight really do a number on his psyche. It’s little wonder that Oblivion finds Fogg in a bar.

Through The Violent Century mostly looks back at Fogg’s past and the violent twentieth century, Tidhar brings everything to a stunning and satisfying conclusion. This book had me hooked from the beginning. It’s full of cameos and hints at our history that I loved puzzling out, on top of a fascinating story with terrific characters. This book is a wonderful adventure.

The great and the good queue up to compare this to le Carré doing cold war superheroes, or Nietzsche writing the X-Men. Which I'm fairly sure some of the better X-Men runs already were, not to mention at least one of the early films, and The Violent Century never quite shakes a sense of being less revolutionary, and closer to its parent genre, than the illustrious blurbers (and perhaps its author too) seem to think. True, there is that same sense, as in le Carré, of an underlying futility to this war in the shadows, that as with spies, both sides having superhumans means much the same result as if neither side did – except, of course, for a few more lives interestingly screwed up along the way. Sure, it remixes a few familiar superhero tropes, with superpowers arriving during the Second World War, and their bearers then surviving into the modern day (or something like it*) outwardly unchanged by the years. But even this reminds me of Zenith, or Wild Cards – two takes on superheroes which were revisionist in the eighties, but now feel like part of the mainstream. Compare this to the rigorously ghastly and apocalyptic wartime superpowers rework Uber (which, like Tidhar, finds a prominent role for Alan Turing), or even David Brin's earlier Life Eaters, and it becomes clear that Tidhar's take is really not as radical as all that. And, on a separate tack, having the scientist responsible for the superpowers be called Vomacht just meant that I kept being nudged by what seemed like a Cordwainer Smith reference, without ever quite grasping what that would be intended to convey if so. This being Tidhar, there are also the obligatory glimpses of other worlds that might have been, including various people who in our world invented superheroes, but faced with the real thing are instead chronicling them. A bit of a stretch, this: Siegel and Shuster could barely even produce competent funnybooks, so I can't see them making it in non-fiction or fine art; and of all Stanley Lieber's many cameos, a familiar catchphrase can't stop this being one of the least convincing.

All of which said, so long as you don't expect the most startlingly new take in the world (or, alternately, if you're not au fait with the state of the superhero art anyway), this is still a Lavie Tidhar novel about superpowered espionage. Which, as pitches go, emphatically does not suck. From the horrors of the Eastern Front and the camps, through the ruins of Berlin, to the various bloody little proxy wars which filled out the 20th century and then came home to roost in the 21st, a cast of the changed and now unchanging dance around each other, enmities and alliances becoming increasingly tangled as the years tick on. The style sometimes recalls a screenplay or a comics script - seen from outside, told as to an artist or an actor, precise on what the audience can or can't deduce about moods and honesty and such. And this, combined with the deliberate opacity of the main protagonist, the mist-manipulating Fogg, and the chopped-up timeline, often makes for a cold and distanced read. But that alienated mood is the book's greatest strength, that sense of time having somehow got out of joint in the early 20th century and nothing since having quite been real. Set against which, the promise represented in fleeting moments by one of the changed, the one among them who seems to have been untainted by it all, and who has what may be the best superpower of the lot: the ability always to go back to that one perfect summer day before everything changed.

*The opening scenes suggest a far more noir London than the one I live in, and I really hope it's a deliberate joke how much scarier the Hole in Wall pub is here than in real life.

This is a brilliant reimagining of superheroes and super-villains, set in the many wars of the twentieth century. When an experiment causes a small number of the world's population to become changed, governments rush to snap up those who can serve best as weapons. The novel follows two heroes, Oblivion and Fogg, from their training as young adults through their service in WWII, Vietnam, and other conflicts. Along the way they work with other changed people, men and women with widely varying powers and abilities and motivations, negotiating lives no one else will fully understand. This is an intelligent novel, a superhero story with deep philosophical roots, with a great sense of history and the consequences, historically speaking, of action and inaction, and a fabulous read with fascinating characters and ideas.

The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar. Tachyon edition ARC reviewed for Netgalley.

Let's say there really were super heroes. That some event created people with powers far beyond any of the rest of us, all over the world. And then the world went to war. What would that be like? What would change? Would the men and women with these powers be human, like the rest of us?

This is the central idea of The Violent Century, the exploration of that great "what if". It asks the questions, explicitly, what makes a hero? What makes a man? I am not sure that it answers them, but it goes deep. It digs and gouges, searching for something. For meaning.

This book is more than another take on the "man behind the mask" trope. It is a paean and an elegy, a love letter to heroes, and a lament at the painful need for them, especially in this last century-the violent century.

Lavie Tidhar is Jewish. This is important. This is important because many of our greatest heroes were born of the Second World War, and were born of Jewish artists, some of whom themselves fought in this war. Stan Lee. Jack Kirby. Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster. Jewish men in America who created heroes to fight enemies that seemed unstoppable. Some of these men actually appear in the novel, and speak of the need for heroes. This is not subtext. It is text. Europe needed Heroes. It got men and women, who might have been heroes of a sort. And millions died.

The heroes in this story are also men and women. They drink, the weep, they cry and fail and die. They have extraordinary power and extraordinary responsibility and still mess it up sometimes. But they try. And they go on, and sometimes the get to find a thing that might make a man. They find some love, perhaps. This might be an answer.

Then there is the structure. The Violent Century is not written like a Novel. It is a comic book with no pictures. The sentences are short. Broken. Sections are into scenes rather than chapters. Descriptions are vivid and dynamic. There are no quotation marks. The dialog runs into the narration because there are no speech balloons to mark it. Again, this is not subtext. It is text, explicit in the story. Eventually.

It is effective.

This book is haunting, and challenging, and exciting. I read it and I will read it again. I am grateful for the chance to review it for Netgalley, but I will buy the book and I will try to see if answers are to be found within, because I think I would like to know what makes a hero and what makes a man.

This is my second read by the author, following his latest book. This one is actually a rerelease from years ago. And I’m thinking Tidhar is an author best appreciated from a rear view mirror perspective. Or, is that doesn’t come across as flatteringly as it’s meant to, his work is the forest not the trees. The trees are easy to get hung up on, because there are so many. And his writing may not be for everyone, in this book there are terrific descriptions, but they read like stage directions. And the timelines jump around with dizzying speed. Toward the end, even midsentence. It actually works well for the novel’s denouement, but it can be disorienting in general. But when you step far enough away to take in the entire thing or consider the book after it’s finished, it’s a work of art. Ambitious, original, smart, daring and exciting. This book has a terrific and oh so erudite foreword which discusses the subgenre of Jewish resistance during WWII, especially via supernatural means. Think along the lines of Inglorious Bastards. But with something extra. Tidhar in this book reimagines the recent century with superheroes or more like people with supernatural abilities, developed following a scientific experiment. Because some exist in every nation, the often balance of cancel each other out, so that the main wars and armed conflicts play out much the same way, but there are conceptually fascinating differences and historical alterations nevertheless. So it’s such an interesting work and it’s done in a variety of genres from noir to spy fiction to sci fi to thriller, there’s even a love story, which not only fits perfectly, it also provides an absolutely perfect ending. The past reimagined, enhanced even, but still recognizably a dramatic, tragic past of violent confrontations and global devastations and amid it all superheroes that don’t require tights or crazy backstories, all too relatable, flawed, complex men and women with abilities they’ve never asked for trying to save the world set on destroying itself. Great story, really great story. Once you get into the writing, it has as certain sweeping quality that’s always so great for a properly immersive reading experience. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

Superheroes and spies, an alternate history of WWII.
I like reading Lavie Tidhar, as I never know what is going to happen in his books. This one ends up following a more predictable path than I might have guessed, but written in short time-hopping vignettes it maintains interest and momentum. The Violent Century seems vaguely familiar to those now used to Captain American, Marvel's Agents of Shield and the rest, but when it was written in 2013 was ahead of the curve. An event, caused by a Nazi scientist, gives a small percentage of the population superpowers - - this is the story of the British secret agency responsible for managing them...and the story of Oblivion and Fogg and Sommertag, tied together over the decades.

The Violent Century is a unique complex work of art. The author has not written a book for the masses, but for a smaller number of people who would enjoy such a complex style of writing.

Got stuck partway through this book and stalled out at about 30%. I'm sure some people will find the mix of fact and fiction, heavily laden with superhero mythos, engaging but I found it more off-putting as my brain attempted to sort between the two. Not my cup of tea and I should probably give up on this author, as I don't seem to be able to engage with what he writes - while it was clear a lot of research had gone into this book, less attention seemed to have been given to developing the characters beyond two dimensions.

In short: not my cup of tea.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a copy of this book, which was received in exchange for an honest review.

Lavie Tidhar’s novels dwell in some clouded never-realm, mixing fact, fiction, reality, and fantasy in a potent gumbo. His wondrous creations, however, often do not follow standard protocol of plot lines. “The Violent Century” is a hybrid mix of X-Men with Inglorious Bastards. It revisits the Second World War with superhumans fighting secretly for both sides. In Britain, the mutants are gathered into a school, a farm, a world where there talents can be cultivated before they are sent out and charged with saving the world. Saving the world means doing battle with the Nazi’s own ubermen whether in Soviet Russia, in Transylvania alongside partisans, or in secret missions in Paris. Along with the battle of superheroes, Tidhar deals with Dr. Mengele, Aushwitz, and the untold battles of thousands of unarmed civilians against the Great Evil.

Much of the story flips back and forth between the farm in Britain pre-war as the great clouds of battle are gathering and the missions throughout the war. But, other time jumping episodes take us through the remainder of the twentieth century from the Cold War and the Berlin Wall to the secret war in Laos to the arming of a young Bin Ladin in Afghanistan (amidst a warning to execute him before...) to the planes launching into the towers as a new century dawned and the age-old battle against evil continued.

The story is told through the adventures of Fogg and Oblivion, two superpowered entities who meet on the farm as children and again throughout the century. They are complex, flawed characters who, despite their awesome powers, are enveloped in loneliness and sadness and never seem to be able to bask in the glory of their accomplishments. The chapters are short. The chapters skip around in time. Moral, ethical questions are posed. A rather unique achievement.

Many thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.