Book Club - January Book
An another exciting year of books is waiting for us. In January we read Fatherland by Robert Harris. We all really enjoyed the book.
I leave you with our lead literary critic Maz.
Enjoy the review!
Fatherland - Robert Harris
A police state is a country run by criminals - the graffiti scrawled on the Werderscher Market wall says it all.
This dystopic vision of terror set in 1964, inspired by the idea that Hitler won the war, provoked the most lively discussion of all our bookclub meetings so far. Probably because of its contemporary relevance. We compared January 6th storming of the Capital in 2021 with 10th November Kristallnacht in 1938. In both cases mob violence, founded upon lies, was psyched up and orchestrated by people in power.
The 6 days of the book amounted to a kind of dark night of the soul for March - whose bravery and moral sense of justice might find its 21st century counterpart in Alexi Navalny. The weather acted as a poetic fallacy: the heavy rain smelt of corruption / the sky and water merged into sheet of grey. This is contrasted with the end of his 6 day ordeal: She had got away. He looked up at the sun and knew it.
We saw the book’s overwhelming theme as betrayal at every level. Those in power achieved this through terror, thuggery, surveillance and radicalisation. Doctors were associated, not with healing, but with torture. Germans remained ignorant of the Final Solution, and would not have believed it anyway. We asked how those in the know could have accepted it, and concluded it was because its victims were dehumanised.
What would it be like to live in a police state? This led to a discussion about freedom of speech, especially with the advent of social media. We saw problems arose with the far left woke culture of de-platforming, cancelling and statue smashing; as much as that of the Proud Boys, White Supremacists, QAnon and holocaust deniers on the far right. In both cases the violent attacking of democratic institutions is essentially fascist.
Finally, we posed the really worrying question: do the lies, lack of trust and trolling on social media spell the end of democracy?