reviewed for the ArtsFuse: https://artsfuse.org/216072/book-review-v2-robert-harriss-gentler-kinder-world-war-ii/

Book Review: “V2” — Robert Harris’s Gentler, Kinder World War II
NOVEMBER 19, 2020 LEAVE A COMMENT

By Clea Simon

This is history from a distance. Harris’s characters feel more real when they’re working out the equations that will make a missile fly or fall than when they’re fleeing a double agent or a misfiring rocket.

V2 : A Novel of World War II by Robert Harris. Knopf, 320 pages, $28.95.

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There’s something comforting about a World War II drama. In this unsettled time, when we are under attack by our own leaders as well as a ruthless virus, it’s relaxing to read about an external enemy — one we vanquished. While some authors, notably Alan Furst, have made a career out of the era’s dread, particularly during those uncertain years leading up to open warfare when sides were being chosen and alliances forged, historical fiction stalwart Robert Harris goes for the consolation of hindsight. In his latest, V2, as a brilliant British intelligence analyst and a German rocket engineer face off in the final years of the war, there’s even the possibility of love across the lines.

The setup is simple. It’s 1944, the V2 is wreaking havoc on London, and Germany’s rocket scientists are making the new weapon more accurate — and deadly — by the day. Given that the new rocket — the first long-range guided ballistic missile — is virtually unstoppable once it is in the air, England’s only hope lies in figuring out where they are being launched from. It is a feat of reverse engineering that, in those precomputer days, must be done with slide rule, pencil and paper, within six seconds of that first flash. The stakes are made clear early on, when Kay Caton-Walsh gets out of bed with her married lover, an Air Commodore, moments before one of the rocket strikes, sending the beautiful Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Section Officer scrambling for help.

Her lover survives, but their affair doesn’t, and, desperate to be rid of her, he arranges for the lower-ranked and apparently unqualified beauty to be shipped off to Belgium to work on the V2 project. What neither of them realize is that Kay has hidden talents, or that she will find herself facing off against a reluctant German genius, Rudi Graf. The fictional Graf is as sympathetic an enemy as Harris could write. An idealistic scientist who once dreamed of space flight, Graf — the engineer at the clandestine Pennemunde launching site — has been co-opted into the Nazi rocket program by his former schoolmate, the historical Wernher von Braun. As he and Kay alternate chapters, his are the ones with more depth and nuance, the losses and compromises that brought him to this point made clear in hindsight. While Kay’s story supposedly has the urgency of a people under attack — real casualties are listed for emphasis — her tale is a bit wooden. There’s the privileged background, the memories of Cambridge, and the inevitable winning over of her skeptical colleagues. It’s fun, in a clockwork kind of way, and long before the two meet, the outcome is obvious.

It’s not that Harris downplays history. His work is clearly meticulously researched, with everything from the new rocket’s specs to the atrocities committed to create it in an underground factory. When he’s writing about the new hardware, he’s at his most poetic. “It was as if they’d come upon some huge and magnificent animal in the wild,” he has Graf muse.

Nor was Harris always so gentle. His 1992 masterwork Fatherland used an alternative history, in which the Nazis had won, as the setting for a multilayered mystery, with his protagonist cop not only solving a murder but also uncovering the Holocaust. Even when staying within the bounds of history, he has excelled at building tension, as with his Enigma (1995) about the code-breakers of Bletchley, or 1998’s Archangel, set in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The dulling of Harris’s edge could be attributed to age — a mellowing that allowed the author to find a happy ending in 2003’s Pompeii — yes, really — and a certain talkiness to 2018’s Munich. But in last year’s The Second Sleep, he created a thoroughly unnerving historical fiction, revisiting medieval England with a twist that would give Barbara Tuchman nightmares.

If I were to indulge in a little armchair analysis, I would say that that last novel showed Harris coming to terms with mortality. His dark ages are truly that. Which would make V2 either a throwback or a way of cleaning out his desk. Putting to use the research he has done over the years. Because even as Harris has Kay making her dazed way through a bombed-out London and a fearful Rudi witnessing what happens to his dissenting colleagues, there’s a softness in V2, a sentimentality. This is history from a distance. His characters feel more real when they’re working out the equations that will make a missile fly or fall than when they’re fleeing a double agent or a misfiring rocket. Maybe that makes this an ideal read for the times, but it also makes Harris’s latest novel a bit of a disappointment, its expected explosion a squib.

Clea Simon’s rock-world novel World Enough was named a “must read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her next, Hold Me Down, will be published by Polis Books in September 2021. She can be reached at www.CleaSimon.com

In reading V2, at one point, I was reminded of the classic Chuck Jones “Road Runner” cartoons, which feature a brilliant but inept coyote who uses various stratagems and devices (which of course always backfire) to dispatch a blameless bird. V2 is not quite like that; it involves two people who are trying to kill each other at long range, with neither of them knowing that the other even exists. One is a German engineer at a missile base in Holland, lobbing “buzz bombs” in the general direction of England; the other is a WAAF reconnaissance expert in Buckinghamshire, trying to direct RAF bombing raids to prevent future missile attacks.

Both are using the tools they have at hand. The German uses a primitive long-range guided ballistic missile, for which the lack of accuracy is, as we would say today, a feature and not a bug. The V in V2 stands for vengeance; it was meant by the Wehrmacht to be a retaliation for Allied bombing raids on civilian targets. Although the German engineer takes pains to target the missile on the center of London, the results are utterly unpredictable. Harris begins his novel with two actual V2 attacks on London, both which almost—but not quite—land on top of his British protagonist.

Just as the German engineer does, the WAAF analyst uses the tools at hand to locate the German bases and to direct air raids on their suspected positions. The first of these is photo-reconnaissance; RAF pilots dropped their planes below the cloud cover to take pictures of German bases, which were then analyzed and turned into targeting tools. But the German V2 bases in Holland were expertly camouflaged, hidden under the cover of trees. What the British did to counter this—and what inspired Harris to write V2—was to assign a squad of WAAF officers with mathematics skills in a recently-recaptured Belgian town. Once they were given the inputs regarding the launch angle of the rockets, and the precise location of the target in England, they could then—at least in theory—work backwards to calculate the location of the rocket launch.

Both what the Germans were trying to do and what the British were trying to do to counter them would be made efficient, if not necessarily easy, by twenty-first century technology. A computer chip in the nose of the rocket could utilize global positioning signals to direct its route to whatever target you would like. Similarly, a satellite could pinpoint the location of a launch site—even providing a video feed of the launch itself--leading to the obliteration of the launch site in turn. The key thing to remember here is that the twenty-first century technology is based on the ability to send satellites into space, and one reason America has that capacity then is because of Wernher von Braun, who appears in V2 as a minor character.

The author of the historical novel has an initial choice to make; are his primary characters going to be identifiable historical characters, or are they going to be fictional characters appearing in the historical context? To use Harris’s trilogy of novels about Cicero as an example, the main character is of course Cicero, but the narrator is fictional—or rather, a fictionalized version of one of Cicero’s real slaves, about whom we know next to nothing except that he initialized the use of the ampersand. Here, Harris uses two fictional characters—which is probably the right choice.

But the inherent challenge in simultaneously telling the V2 story from both the British side and the German side is that the author must get the reader to have at least a little sympathy for the German character—and if you humanize the German character, so must you humanize the British character. Unfortunately, this is the part of V2 that works the least well. The WAAF analyst is bland, competent, and longsuffering in the classic stiff-upper-lip style. The German engineer is earnest, conflicted, and grieving a recent loss, and thoroughly disgusted with the war and its suffering. But you can’t let the German character off the hook for the outrages of the Nazi regime, and Harris balances what sympathy the reader might have for the engineer with his complicity with the slave labor used to build the V2 bases.

What I think Harris might be doing here, in pitting these two unmemorable characters against each other, and having them attack each other at long distance by proxy, is saying something about the impersonal nature of modern war. It is not at all like war as described by Thomas Hardy in “The Man He Killed,” in which the protagonist shoots his would-be friend-turned-enemy in the face at short range. There’s nothing “quaint and curious” about a V2 attack, or a Lancaster bombing raid—and still less a Hellfire drone guided by a GPS system.

There is a lot to like about V2; the history is presented accurately and fairly, the emotions of the characters are on point, and the technical details are interesting but don’t swat the reader over the head the way modern technothrillers tend to do. But the best historical novels have the characters drive the history, here, it is the history that drives the characters. V2 is more than worth it for the history—particularly the hidden history of the WAAF—but Harris can’t bring the characters up to that high standard.