Customer Reviews

The Kingdom of Ashes

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In the small town of Rehstadt in the British Zone of Germany in 1946 the British have set up an interrogation centre for so-called `lesser' German war-criminals - not the big beasts then on trial in Nuremberg. There is an elaborate protocol: if the British have captured men who are wanted for trial by the Americans, the British first have to find enough evidence to hand these men over to them. In charge of the interrogations is Captain Alex Foster, who is basically a decent man. Among the German prisoners he has to interrogate is one Captain Johannes Walther, who appears to have been implicated in the massacre of American prisoners of war, and the Americans are keen to have him handed over, although, for some reason (never explained) they have not supplied the British with full documentation. Alex is also to interrogate a Waffen SS colonel whom the Russians want for atrocities he had committed and whom the Americans then want to exchange for a prisoner held by the Russians.

The main thread of the novel (though it often disappears among at least three extensive subplots) is the position in which Alex finds himself, pressured by the Americans and by Colonel Dyer, his own superior officer, to produce the results they want.

As one might expect, the atmosphere in Rehstadt is full of resentments and corruption. The book has a large assortment of crudely unpleasant characters - British, American, and German. A few are shown sympathetically, including a compassionate British army doctor and a German girl with whom Alex falls in love. But I found Alex himself unconvincing; the plot and subplots are too diffuse to work as effectively as they should have done; there is much padding out with inconsequential detail; the style is on the flat side (except for the colourful language of one of the nastiest characters in the book); and I kept on comparing this book with a much superior novel I have read recently (and reviewed on Amazon) which also dealt with events in an occupied German town in 1945 - Adam Thorpe's "The Rules of Perspective" - in which I think the psychology is far subtler and more nuanced than it is here.

A confused pedestrian attempt, set in post war Germany in 1946, to tie together three plot lines; a love affair between a young Brit and a German woman scarred by the war, a post war Nuremberg-esque war crimes inquiry and the inexplicable death of a pregnant woman by a good Samaritan doctor yearning to return home to his wife and daughters "at that end of that English country lane." Lacking subtlety, Edric hammers on character traits in repetitious boring dialogue one bad scene after another. The fuzzy faced protagonist opens each chapter walking from his room to the "Institute," looking for his German girl friend and then jumping to his Jeep to drive her home or to see her stone mason father. The apex of silliness is reached when one Brit accuses another of being in "the Moral Majority." In 1946? At the end, there is no closure because the author was completely adrift in his self created mess.