I have to tell you, this one hurts. Being sucker-punched by someone you trusted always smarts, and my great admiration for Philip Kerr’s writing makes my disappointment—I could have said feeling of betrayal—on reading Field Gray all the more painful.
Kerr’s continuing character, World War II era Berlin-based detective/cop/soldier Bernie Gunther, is a splendid literary achievement. He’s a relatively decent man in an insanely indecent situation. He tries to do what he sees as right, but is constantly undercut by history. He’s Philip Marlowe on a meaner street, facing challenges Raymond Chandler knew nothing of.
He hates the Nazis and the Communists equally, he informs us. That suited me just fine. But what I didn’t realize (though I should have guessed from heavy hints in the last novel, The One From the Other) is that there’s one group he hates even more.
The Americans.
You see, the Americans have committed unforgivable crimes. They eat too much. They think they won the war. They see the world in black and white. They don’t always live up to their principles, which makes them hypocrites, and thus far worse than mere mass murderers. They treated Bernie real mean, arresting him in Cuba at the beginning of this book, beating him up (under the impression he was a fugitive war criminal), and imprisoning him for a while at Guantanamo (GUANTANAMO!!!!!), where it was hot and there were mosquitoes. Compared to that his treatment by the Communists, who merely put him in a death camp, mining radioactive pitchblende, obviously pales.
There is one passing reference to the Berlin Airlift in this novel. Bernie brushes it aside. Obviously the Americans did it “for themselves.”
And so he chooses a Communist agent, a murderer who has tried to murder Bernie himself in the past, over a group of American agents who have done him no harm at all. Because they’re just “Amis,” while a German, you know, is a German. Apparently it comes down to “Deutschland über alles” after all.
I’m sure Philip Kerr doesn’t want any of my filthy American money, and he may rest assured I won’t spend any more on his books.
Field Gray is a superbly written novel that I do not recommend at all.
Whoa! Maybe I’m jaded, but I saw his anti-Americanism as in keeping with Bernie’s character of cynicism. It IS well-written.
Cynical yes, but not evil. And what he does at the end of this book looks evil to me. I don’t think Kerr thinks it’s evil, though.
Many a creature will tell you what it fears most, by loudly denouncing it from a safe distance.
I believe that some people have long been more afraid of the harm America could do in her naivete and self-assurance than of the evil that civilization’s enemies could accomplish deliberately. Many of those people have envied America her casual power and significance in virtually everything.
Fear and envy transmute naturally to hatred.
None of which do I offer to excuse the sucker-punch.