Richard Harris, Munich

Richard Harris, Munich
Alfred A. Knopf © 2017 Canal K Limited
Ebook ISBN 978-0-5255-2—276
Also available in print editions

This is the third of Harris’s books I’ve read; like the other two (Enigma, about the code-breaking operation in England during WW2; An Officer and a Spy, about the Dreyfus affair), this one provides a fictional look inside an important historical event.  This one takes place over a brief period of time in September 1938, culminating with a conference in Munich, wherein England and France consented to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.  The events are seen largely through the experiences of two young, fairly junior foreign office officials, Hugh Legat in England and Paul von Hartmann, in Berlin.  They know each other, although they have not met since 1932, when Legat was at Oxford and Hartmann was also in attendance.

The rest of the cast consists mostly of people in positions of authority and power in England and in Germany.  The story is, of course, the events leading up to the Munich conference.  There are, as well, other things going on.  Legat’s marriage is not going well, and Hartmann is involved in a more hopeful than effective plot against Hitler.

While this is not a period of history in which I have immersed myself (Harris’s bibliography runs to more than 2 pages), it’s an episode that we all have at least passing familiarity.  Harris creates—or re-creates—the events of four days ending with “peace in our time,” and I have to say the whole thing is extraordinarily convincing as a reconstruction.  The atmosphere,  both in London and in Berlin and Munich, are brilliantly handled, and the two key players in the drama—Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler—are portrayed in what seems to me to be a pitch-perfect manner.  (The French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, and ambassador to Germany, André François-Poncet, don’t come off very well, and Mussolini seems perhaps more of a buffoon than he actually was).  The secondary characters in this episode are more perfunctorily drawn, but still seem true enough to what I know of their actual character.

Very little, overall, can surprise us, but Harris makes the events vivid and the magnitude of the stakes quite real.  If you have any interest in this period, and would like a look at it that illuminates the personalities involved, I don’t think you’ll find anything that surpasses this.  At least as a work of fiction.