The Prodigal Spy

 
The Good German by Joseph Kanon
(Henry Holt, $26.00, NV) ISBN 0-8050-6422-2
***
I don’t know how many publishing execs eventually turn their hands to novel-writing, but I do know that I’ve read the best efforts by many of them, and they’re usually not very good. On the other hand.... Here’s Joseph Kanon’s third novel, following the magnificent Los Alamos and the slightly less magnificent The Prodigal Spy. The Good German is, you probably saw this coming, less successful than its predecessors. If his first novel was a grand slam, and his second was an over-the-wall home run, then this one’s a solid inside-the-park homer: it still gets where it needs to go, but with a lot more work and a lot less panache.

Jake Geismar was CBS’s Berlin correspondent during World War Two; then the war ended, and he scored a plum assignment: covering the Potsdam Conference, and writing a series of articles detailing the Allied occupation of the German capital. This is all pretty good, career-building stuff, but Jake has a personal agenda: find the woman he hasn’t seen since the war began. All by itself, this would have been a good story: a love story, perhaps, set against the backdrop of a Germany trying to find itself again after the fiasco of the war. But Kanon adds something else: a murder. An American soldier is killed; following the story, Jake uncovers, you guessed it, a devious plot that originates deep in the heart of the Allied occupation force.

It’s a good mystery - who killed the soldier, and why? - but it seems, I don’t know, a little unnecessary. Kanon does such a good job of plunking us down in 1945 Berlin (he really is very good at the historical novel: read his first two, if you don’t believe me) that he doesn’t need a murder mystery to hold our interest. I would have been happy just following Jake as he searched for his lost love. Post-war Germany is, in Kanon’s hands, as real as our own living rooms, a downright fascinating place, and all the whodunit stuff just gets to be a little distracting, from time to time. Anyway, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: judged against similar offerings from Kanon’s competitors, The Good German is a very good novel. Judged against Kanon’s own work, though, it feels slightly weak, slightly forced, slightly unsure of itself. It’s a murder mystery in which the murder mystery itself is unnecessary.

--David Pitt


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