Customer Reviews

Winston's War

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Based on historical fact, WINSTON'S WAR is a solid and absorbing fictional rendition of the leadership struggle between Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill between October 1, 1938 and May 10, 1940.

As the book opens, Chamberlain has returned to 10 Downing Street a public hero after the signing of the Munich Agreement between himself and Adolf Hitler which gave the latter the Sudetenland in return for "peace in our time". Meanwhile, relegated to the periphery of British politics and virtually an outcast, Churchill obstinately lashes out against appeasement and loudly proclaims the necessity for total war to save democracy from the depredations of the Nazis. What subsequently follows is history: the German subjugation of the rest of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland, the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, the Phony War, the Soviet invasion of Finland, the British military's Norwegian fiasco, and the crisis in His Majasty's government in May 1940 that ultimately elevated Winston to the premiership.

The cast of characters in this sweeping story by Michael Dobbs of political maneuvering, skullduggery, and backstabbing is an historical Who's Who of the times: the ailing, haughty, and pacifist Chamberlain, who personifies England's bitter memories of the Great War and the popular concept of "never again"; the ambitious and self-absorbed Churchill, whose pugnacity sometimes clouds prudence; the defeatist, philandering, and anti-Semitic U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy; the alcoholic, disillusioned and psychologically tortured idealist, Guy Burgess (of Burgess, Philby, and Maclean of Cold War infamy); the stuttering King George VI, who whines that the German invasion of Poland interrupted his grouse hunting; and the Machiavellian newspaper mogul, William "Max" Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook.

It's in the minor details with which Dobbs fleshes out the story of Chamberlain's fall and the rise of his nemesis, Churchill, to an epic 685 paper-backed pages (UK HarperCollins edition). And it's the length of WINSTON'S WAR that is, perhaps, a minor flaw. Some of the subplots seemed unnecessary, and should have been severely cropped by a ruthless editor: the love affair between the crippled WWI survivor "Mac" McFadden, barber to the politically great and one of Guy's information sources, and Carol, a housemaid and part-time prostitute; and between Bournemouth postmistress Sue Graham and Army Sergeant Jerry White - though the experiences of the latter did usefully tie the Norway debacle into the storyline on a personal level. Slightly more relevant, but still mildly tedious, was the dysfunctional relationship between Brendan Bracken, Churchill's closest confidant, and Kennedy's niece, Anna Fitzgerald. Perhaps Dobbs perceived a need to include Carol, Sue and Anna to make it less of a Guy Read.

Chamberlain was toppled not because he sought to appease Hitler and avert a cataclysm, but because he didn't have the mettle to wage all-out war when the necessity for it was thrust upon him. That was to prove to be Winston's genius. The author's genius is in portraying the labyrinthine venality of Whitehall and Fleet Street powerbroking at a time when solidarity against a rapacious common enemy was desperately necessary.

WINSTON'S WAR is the first in a series of novels about Churchill's wartime leadership. According to the back cover, the next book is apparently NEVER SURRENDER. I shall seek out and buy it immediately.

Many writers of historical fiction start with an actual event in history, and then let their imaginations run free. This fascinating book shows great imaginative restraint. Certainly there are fictional threads running through the tale, but Mr. Dobbs seriously wants to tell us about Neville Chamberlain's politics of appeasement, a policy that ended with his downfall as Prime Minister.

Throughout the book we are a fly on the wall listening to the political machinations of the principle characters in the story which include, Chamberlain, Churchill, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Lord Halifax, the traitor Guy Burgess, and many others. It is fascinating to see Chamberlain's party struggle to hold on as their political capital steadily declined. Churchill, on the other hand starts as an outcast, one who continually cries out that peace with Hitler is an unattainable goal. His rise to First Lord of the Admiralty, and then to Prime Minister is a long fight against the odds.

I am a history buff who's read books on WWII and English history, and this book taught me many things that I didn't know. Now I've said that this book fascinated me, the almost 700 pages just sped by, but I must say that this book may not be everybody's cup of tea. It definitely is not a wartime thriller. The novel is full of conversation, and as for action you'll have to settle for walks through the garden of Buckingham Palace with Lord Halifax, and King George VI (who, we find out, was so tongue tied that it was difficult for him to make clear statements).

I picked this book up in Bangkok as I was browsing through a second hand book store, and didn't expect much until I read that this was a novel by the guy who wrote House of Cards, To Play the King and The Final Cut.

As mentioned above, this covers the events leading up to World War 2. It provides a great insight into the behind the scenes goings-on in parliament, the rivalries and treacheries in the run up to Winston Churchill becoming Britains war time Prime Minister.

It's a superb read, really gripping from the first page through to the end. Definately recommended for anyone who has an interest in WW2, Churchill or British history. In fact, I would definately recommend this to anyone, it's easy going and difficult to put down.

I very much wanted to love this book. Having read an excellent one-volume biography of Churchill (if such a life can be crammed into a single volume), having greatly enjoyed Michael Dobbs' riveting fresh look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, and being a fan of historical fiction, I eagerly embarked on this multi-volume historical fiction series on one of the past century's greatest leaders and most accomplished individuals.

However, I must say, the book delivers less than its jacket cover and glowing blurbs promise. It is a fine book as far as it goes, and I plan on reading the next volume, with the hope that Dobbs will do better, but ultimately was disappointed.

These are momentous, dramatic events that form the heart of this novel and the ones to come. They have tremendous, inherent power. Hitler is on the march in Europe. The only voice of reason is Churchill. We, the reader, know this to be true. We know that when Chamberlain seeks peace, he is the wrong path. How does Churchill feel about this? How does he deal with these frustrations? He has had an amazingly full, rich career already - with ups and downs, and with what the British public view to be heroic acts as well as tragic, bloody mistakes. He is out there warning all those who will listen about Hitler, and he is doing so with substantive information, with insight, with passion. He is letting fellow Britons know that their defenses are inadequate - he has sources inside the military, the ministries, who are telling him these things, showing him these things- he is not only a sitting member of Parliament, after all, he is Churchill.

What must it have been like? Hitler on the move, Mussolini prancing around, Chamberlain ineffectual, the British public asleep. A blurb on the book cover says that Dobbs brings us inside of Churchill's head -so that we think as he thinks.

Sigh. Not so. Not in this book. We are inside Churchill's head hardly at all. We learn hardly any of this.

What do we learn, who do we meet, and what events are we witness to? We meet a few fictional side characters that Dobbs develops nicely and that we grow to care something about. We spend a lot of time with the well-known British spy, Guy Burgess. Dobbs does well in creating some suspense around a subplot involving Burgess and Churchill which I won't spoil here. Then there are some characters floating around Churchill and Chamberlain that are nicely drawn, like Joe Kennedy. And there's Chamberlain.

While Dobbs paints these characters in a convincing way and creates dramatic tension around various conflicts involving their inter-relationships, I found myself growing impatient with their interactions. The march toward world war kept proceeding, and instead of getting insights into the key events, I kept reading about petty parliamentary backbiting and these interpersonal tensions that felt a bit contrived to me. It was as if Dobbs felt compelled to put in some "fictional" tension to justify writing this as a "novel," when all the drama one could ever dream of was right there in front of him.

It sounds crazy of me to critique this book in that way - I could never write something like this, so who am I to criticize? I just know how good Dobbs is at writing actual history, so I can imagine what he could have done here had he raised his sights more.

As it is, I found myself pulled along by Dobbs' skilled writing and the inherent drama of the "big events" - it's unavoidable, though Dobbs didn't overtly mine it- and so I read it through quickly to the end. But I felt he could have done so much more.

I thought, for example, that the book would have benefited greatly from more historical references - every now and then there's an actual letter - and more detailed notes. Major decisions seem to be made based on internal (petty) politics without any consideration of larger geopolitical issues. If this is in fact supported by the historical record, such notes or other references would make the novel much more compelling. Without it, a reader like me is left wondering "is that really something that could have happened?"

In other words, the strength of historical fiction lies in the suspension of disbelief. That's what made Killer Angels such a timeless Civil War classic -its realistic portrayal of what the generals were thinking and doing during the Battle of Gettysburg. Had that book made key battlefield decisions seem to hinge on minor interpersonal disputes alone (though of course those have their place), without also bringing in everything else about the battle that made it so memorable, the reader would have scratched his head and wondered, "surely Lee didn't do that just because Pickett insulted him five years ago and he never forgave him?"

So, I will read the next book in this series. But if it focuses as much on the minor details - actual or invented - at the expense of the greater sweep of events - it is that sweep which is why I'm interested in these books, after all - then it will be my last.

This fictional work is as fine a book as any non fiction book covering the period leading up to Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister. The reader witnesses the chicanery and dangerous self serving and selfishness of Chamberlain and his cronies. It leaves the reader wondering what the world would look like today if the forces of appeasement had been victorious over Churchill. A great read that gives wonderful insight into the mess inherited by Churchill from Chamberlain and his ilk. The author has done a fine job in remaining historically accurate as he spins his enjoyable tale.

The book starts off in an annoying way--cramming in all the real life characters who were part of Churchill's world in 1939-1940. Bear with the author, however, because he then spins an intricate story based largely on the actual history of the times. He takes you very much behind the scenes of the drama of Churchill's rise to power. OK, the author takes some historical liberties--Ambassador Kennedy is an easy target and Dobbs shoots so many arrows into him that he looks like a porcupine, but, on balance, the author deserves great credit fot making this bleak period in Chutrchill's life come alive.

In writing a series of novels about Winston Churchill's wartime leadership, British politician-turned-author Michael Dobbs has a prodigious quantity of documentation to call upon, not least Churchill's own six-volume history, THE SECOND WORLD WAR. But Churchill's prose, though by no means self-effacing, is dry and even circumspect. His account of the last days of the Neville Chamberlain administration, leading to his own elevation as Prime Minister, is a laconic six pages. Not only does Dobbs devote the last hundred pages of his book to these nail-biting events, he structures the entire novel to lay the groundwork for them.

His subtitle is "A Novel of Conspiracy." For Dobbs, it is not a matter of the inevitable rise of talent to the top (although he is a great admirer of Churchill), but a constant war of factional infighting, sexual intrigue, espionage, and blackmail. Nor is the spying a purely national affair: Dobbs makes much of a recorded early contact between Churchill and Guy Burgess, later unmasked as a KGB agent; he also suggests that the household of US Ambassador Joe Kennedy (the father of the 39th President, shown in most unflattering light) was a source of information that eventually found its way to the Germans. Such speculations aside, the central thesis is based on fact; despite Churchill's public show of support for Neville Chamberlain, there was a longstanding rivalry between the two men, as documented by Graham Stewart in BURYING CAESAR: THE CHURCHILL-CHAMBERLAIN RIVALRY. But Dobbs goes much further, in the manner of his own novel and TV series HOUSE OF CARDS, and such Jeffrey Archer books as FIRST AMONG EQUALS. By inventing subplots, machinations, numerous minor characters, and liaisons both gay and straight, Dobbs makes this whole saga immensely entertaining. The nearly-600 pages of this fat book (surely it could have used smaller type?) go very quickly. There are a number of anachronistic touches that jar on a reader who grew up in that period, more or less, but on the whole Dobbs' ability to amplify the historical record without unduly distorting it is remarkable.

Let's face it, though, one of the great pleasures of reading this kind of historical fiction is the 20/20 hindsight we can bring to it. We chuckle to see one famous person with his pants down (perhaps even literally); we congratulate ourselves on seeing another, not yet so famous, and predicting what will become of him; we watch events in the making whose outcome we know, but whose precise course is a mystery. In making his readers buy into that mystery, Michael Dobbs has produced a wonderful escapist entertainment that nonetheless sends us back to the history books to find out more.

Full of atmosphere, world war II feel to it. He does a good job, in this whole series, of bringing Churchill to life as a very real and human character. It is a novel and not historical text book but he really takes you into the time and place. I've enjoyed this whole series, would recommend them to anyone who is interested in this era but remind them that they are fiction, good fiction never the less.

Michael Dobbs, Winston's War (2002, 2009) and Churchill's Triumph (2005, 2008)

A principal advisor for British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the holder of a Ph. D. in nuclear defense studies, Michael Dobbs knows of what he writes when he takes on British politics. These are two of his series of novels following the career of Winston Churchill from his accession to the prime ministership in 1940 through the momentous meeting of Churchill, Stalin and FDR in Yalta in 1945, which settled the fate of Poland and, by inference, other eastern European countries for decades. The subtitle of the first novel is "A Novel of Conspiracy" and the conspiracies are largely the work of prime minister Neville Chamberlain who came back to England from giving away Czechoslovakia to Hitler and talked about how he had earned England "peace in our time," only to discover within the next year that he hadn't. The second book has as its subtitle "A Novel of Betrayal." The betrayal is FDR's, who was so eager to secure Stalin's approval of the United Nations that he moved away from his wartime ally Churchill and gave away Poland and large parts of China to the crass and ruthless Stalin. There are lapses of style and construction in both novels but they're almost beside the point, so compelling is the story Dobbs tells and so appealing is the larger than life figure of their protagonist.

I'm probably in the camp of the earlier reviewer who said they really wanted to like this book. I've read a number of books about Churchill over the years, so many of the characters in this book are familiar and known names. Still, when Mr. Dobbs goes into long and detailed conversations between these "real" people, how much of this is what those people said and thought versus what the author needs to make a good tale? By labeling this "historical fiction", what's the obligation of the author to observe the former, when the latter might make for a better read? I mean this as no criticism to Mr. Dobbs, since he properly calls this a historical fiction.

Mr. Dobbs has written a good book that is an interesting read. Still, my concern about books of this sort is how quickly the reader may forget the author's "fiction" disclaimer, and take this for total "history". I received this book as a gift from a friend who told me that I'd enjoy it, because, "it tells you what really happened". That's my concern....