William F. Buckley’s novels have always been a quiet, minor pleasure, at least for me. Buckley wasn’t a great novelist. He was a fine writer, and his books are well-researched and informative. But they lack strong characters, and everybody in them talks like William F. Buckley. Not a bad thing in itself, but it plays hob with T.W.S.O.D.*

I learned interesting things about the Nuremberg Tribunals in the reading, but I never worked up a whole lot of personal concern for the characters.

The main character in Nuremberg: The Reckoning is Sebastian Reinhard, a young German-born American. The book opens with a prequel, showing Sebastian’s father, an architect, as he works desperately to get his wife and son out of Germany. He succeeds, but fails to escape himself. Some time later he is reported dead.

Sebastian reaches draft age just as the war is winding down. Instead of seeing combat, he is assigned to serve as an interpreter in Nuremberg, assisting in the prosecution of a fictional war criminal named Gen. Amadeus. Through Sebastian’s eyes we are able to observe the struggles of life in postwar Germany, and the complicated legal and diplomatic maneuvers involved in conducting a series of trials for which there was no historic precedent. Most of the cast of characters are people who actually lived, and there is much to learn for those who (like me) hadn’t studied the trials (or even seen the movie).

Yet somehow, when it was done, it felt unfinished to me. Perhaps that was Buckley’s intention, in view of the moral ambivalencies of the whole project, the impossibility of making the criminals suffer proportionately to the sufferings they’d inflicted; the hypocrisy of allowing the Soviets to sit in gleeful judgment on monsters not appreciably worse than themselves.

But one way or another, there wasn’t a whole lot of satisfaction here.

*The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.