The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard, tr. Mark Polizzotti

Winner of the 2017 Prize Goncourt, newly translated to English and published by Picador UK in January 2019.
⭐⭐⭐ ½
What is the purpose of novels like this one, with stories that stick closely to real historical events?

I can only suppose that here, one purpose was to relate history in a style different from a serious non-fiction history book. And, if you are not otherwise very interested in the minutiae of the events, and don't object to the addition of the occasional sneeze, speculation on how a historical figure felt, and conversations about [classical] music politicians were known to like, it makes for more lively reading.

The other is perhaps to get the attention of that subgroup of literary fiction readers who rarely pick up a history book - especially in a case like this, where historical events are related with an eye to contemporary political relevance; it is one of the countless books that could share the title The Nazis: A Warning from History. It addresses support for the Nazis from German big business of the 1930s, and the stages of the Austrian Anschluss.

The Order of the Day is very short and was first published, in France, in May 2017 so it's reasonable to assume it, or most of it, was written in 2016 - although French writers were already concerned about the rise of nationalism a little earlier: there are several far-right characters in Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex 1, released in January 2015.

In 2016, analogies between the Nazis, the 1930s, and current global politics seemed urgent and novel to Anglo-American readers of centre and left-leaning mainstream news, but over the last 2-3 years they have become commonplace cliché, and been joined or superseded by more nuanced comment that we should be mindful equally of similarities and of differences. So The Order of the Day does not feel as fresh and timely as it may have when it was entered for (and won) the 2017 Prix Goncourt.

In a recent discussion thread, The Order of the Day was mooted as a potential inclusion on next month's Booker International longlist, as a 'Brexit book'. However, in the UK, the Brexit vote created divisions which do not mirror those in the novel, especially as readers of translated literary fiction are more likely than the average person to be Remain supporters, and most moderate individuals are tired of the accusation of "Nazi" being flung around by both sides. The Order of the Day is bookended by chapters indicting German captains of industry for financially and politically enabling the rise and endurance of Hitler's regime; they felt that a Nazi government would provide a stable environment for business. (For those outside the UK, big business is overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU, and this is known to probably everyone in the country who's able to understand the news - but the idea of 'dark money' backing a no-deal Brexit only has currency among politics geeks on the left.) Near the end of the book, Alfried Krupp - son of one of those business leaders, and who, behind a facade of good publicity for making reparations to Jews, is said to have made anti-Semitic remarks and dragged out the reparation negotiations deliberately - "would nonetheless become one of the most powerful figures in the Common Market, the king of coal and steel, a pillar of Pax Europaea." The pro-European idea of the Pax Europaea as a strategy to prevent a similar war or repression happening again does not obviously come up in the book. Nazi entanglement with German manufacturing is shown as an inescapable legacy, in the same way that historians of colonial slavery in the Americas have shown that its influence remains with us not only because of racial inequality, but in via Western taste for sugar, coffee and cotton.

I don't think The Order of the Day works as a Brexit novel specifically- it is better seen as one relating to the rise of the far right in general, and a cautionary tale about the complacency of neighbouring countries - British and French inaction and appeasement are prominent in the diplomatic scenes.

Although recent events do not bear out some of Vuillard's details:
It’s strange how the most dyed-in-the-wool tyrants still vaguely respect due process, as if they want to make it appear that they aren’t abusing procedure, even while riding roughshod over every convention.
Whilst it is overkill to describe Trump as a tyrant, this generalisation about dangerous political leaders is clearly not true of him.


Other reviews, and blurbs, for the book have described it as narrating a series of steps by which the Nazis rose to power and war became inevitable. However, it jumps straight from the meeting of business leaders with Hitler in early 1933, to the 1938 "summit" which preceded the Anschluss. There are many points in between which could have been highlighted if charting that trajectory was the novel's aim, not least Britain and France's impassive stance on Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War. It isn't clear to me why Vuillard has chosen the Anschluss as his focus (perhaps he is implying that another power should have invaded and destroyed the broken-down German materiel near Linz, starting the war earlier) - but it was quite interesting, as I haven't studied the political history of WWII formally since secondary school, and most of my own reading has been about social history or tactics. There were quite a few details here I hadn't heard before, or had long forgotten. I suppose I've never actively sought this stuff out because I still find it a bit distasteful reading about the Nazi leadership without comedy to take the edge off - these warmongers without whom none of my grandparents would have met, and two of them would not have had to hide in cargo crates - and in some echo of that, I felt slightly nervous through the 1930s and the war in the book, and relaxed once the narrative got to the Nuremberg Trials and we've 'survived'.

The first review I read of this book was from the Spectator, posted in a Goodreads discussion thread. There was some suggestion that the Spectator reviewer disliked the book because of opinions in the narrative. Not those about Hitler and other major politicians, which it describes as 'uncontroversial' but some phrases about business, for example: Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political contributions.. Or perhaps the hints that the contemporary global situation is growing more and more like Chamberlain's dinner party with Ribbentrop, where the PM, a model of upper-middle class politeness, continued to listen to the German ambassador's small-talk without confrontation, although he'd been handed news of the Anschluss.

For me personally, the most interesting and confrontational point was part of a sentence from Lord Halifax: "'And I daresay if we were in their [the Nazis'] position we might feel the same.’ Such were the foundations of what, still today, we call the Policy of Appeasement."
For those of us who grew up with the ideal of listening to, understanding and empathising with all sides - and that it was more laudable to strive to understand those on the other side than to be partisan (a product of the tail end of the post-war consensus and the dawn of third-way politics) the recent shift towards polarised extremes and no-platform/don't debate fascists is disorientating. It is hard to find your footing when some of the ideas you learnt as the polestar of everyday morality don't always correlate with magnetic north any more, but sometimes they still do. Now the rules have different patterns, but only in some places, and the pin of the compass won't quite settle.

Otherwise, for me the most interesting parts of The Order of the Day were not about political leaders. They were about the lesser-known famous people mentioned in passing, like the artist Louis Soutter (whose drawings, made in an asylum, Vuillard sees as an unwitting allegory for the looming war); the tennis player Bill Tilden, about who Ribbentrop bores on; and the brief list of ordinary Austrian men and women who killed themselves as the Germans were, to all intents and purposes, invading, and the life stories Vuillard imagines for them.

I am not sure to whom I'd recommend this book - it seems like something you'd read because you think you should, or because it won't take long - but if you want to know more about the Anschluss beyond its definition, whilst recognising that this is slightly embellished fiction, this novella is less dry than a textbook, and short enough not to overstay its welcome.

(read & reviewed Feb 2019)

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Excellent Scottish historical crime novel, shortlisted for the Booker in 2016.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Honestly, "literary crime fiction" can be a bit dull sometimes, can't it? All those chilly, brittle delineations of character and meditations on why. The writing may be absent the tiresome clunks often found in a commercial procedural, but also missing is the compulsive moreishness that means you've read a third of the book before you've even looked up from the page again, perplexed and perhaps worried that something so fucking grim is also so much fun. Not so here. This is a book I'd highly recommend to everyone on my GR friendslist who enjoys superbly-done genre writing. It also has greater depth and interest than much contemporary litfic with more overt pretension.

Among the great fascinations here are the character of seventeen year old Roderick himself and how he is developed - the sort of character whom in the hands of a less skilled author could appear clumsily created to appeal to the typical reader of books, somewhat more solitary and intelligent than those around him, with a few aspie-sounding traits. But he never evoked the heroines or heroes of those cheesy bestsellers about magical bookshops and the like, rather this felt like a completely authentic portrait of the sort of young person who the village schoolmaster wished would go to university, but who had to stay and work the family farm, the ways in which such a person's routine days may have been spent. (I daresay a few of you think of this type as being among your ancestors too.) His blend of thoughts seemed so well chosen it was sometimes hard to believe he hadn't been a real person - the tendencies shared with the men of the Scottish Enlightenment and their intellectual descendants, just communicated more plainly, and others with obvious roots in the remote crofting hamlet (c.f. the miller in the microhistory [book:The Cheese and the Worms|71148]) and his mixture of bolshiness and spartanness that is IMO utterly characteristic of a certain kind of bright Scot. The presentation of multiple accounts of the 'case' leads to a curious co-existence of sympathy and more detached views of Roderick. (The presentation is immersive enough that a few people have tagged the novel as 'true crime' and I felt I should do a search to be completely sure it was fiction.)

This is also a story about religion and class.

The story is set a short while after the major phases of the Highland Clearances, but the same powerlessness in the face of of landowners still exists, and still educated characters from further south just don't get it. His Bloody Project is the type of historical novel that leans far more towards accuracy than towards wish-fulfilment for modern readers, but it has modern concerns about the voices of the voiceless, about well-meaning do-gooders, about snobs and their theories on the degenerate poor. It simultaneously makes one relieved that better checks and balances exist now, but concerned about their erosion. And one may feel we know better than the C19th "criminal anthropologist" in certain of his ideas - but how different are some of our current ones, and can we really know they are correct?

I'd forgotten just how utterly pervasive its puritan fatalism of Scots Presbyterianism can be (a tendency which IMO seeps into the Scots mindset even among the non-religious: where does stoicism and acceptance become passivity, exactly?) - and it's possible I've read an equally good evocation of the way this fatalism held people back in its mind forg'd manacles, but if I ever have I can't remember what it was. This book communicates it so very well to the modern reader without any sledgehammering, using characters who are both within and outwith that frame of mind. It's the great unspoken among the educated characters: have they not spotted its role because it's as pervasive as air, or because it's not yet the done thing to question it? Should I even be blaming it on organised Christianity when its roots in more ancient superstitions are also seen here? It may have been a part of the place for centuries or even millenia before John Knox, no doubt a communal coping tactic in a harsh landscape. It may be ancient, but in Roddy there's something modernist and existentialist about it too.
That which cannot be talked about by the characters is still barely talked about in the book, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. [Major spoiler follows.] It is my theory that Roderick wrote his account in good faith, and that the suppression of sexual topics in his environment, especially his own family, was such that he was unable to verbalise or even think coherently about them, betraying them only through non-verbal discomfort. The contrast between his memoir and the PM report was obvious and I was waiting to see if or how this would be dealt with overtly later in the novel. This type of suppression wouldn't be widely acknowledged until Freud, and so it seems fitting to be frustrated by the mixture of insight and its absence from the C19th experts. I consider that religion, plus some kind of idea of vengeance for Broad's treatment of Jetta and her fate, underlay Flora's injuries - but, being deeply conscious of the following as a historically situated viewpoint just as Thomson's was, that it is possible the lad had some sort of propensity to sexual misdemeanours anyway, and it's impossible to tell whether that would have still existed in him had he lived in a time and place with very different attitudes: whether it's all about the suppression as a trigger to or creator of his propensities, or whether they would always have been there full stop. Both of which likewise relate to the suspicion that hangs around the father sleeping in the same room as Jetta after Una's death. Regardless of these details, Roderick was still a dangerous individual. It was interesting that the way he killed the murder victims so closely resembled the way he killed the sheep; a modern liberal interpretation - which I'm sure would not be looked kindly upon those in the meat trade - would be that the experience of killing a fairly large mammal, and the fact that this was a normal thing to do in his world, had removed some of the empathic barriers to killing a person, leaving only fear and self-interest as the main inhibitions.

This is one of the best crime novels I've read (a surprising proportion of those are Scottish), notable for its intricate attention to larger themes and historical setting, alongside being a thumping good read - deserving of the greater audience the Booker longlisting has brought it, and all the more enjoyable in that context because of the way it zips along and focuses on people somewhere far removed from the typical Booker settings of London/New York/Mumbai.

(read & reviewed August 2016; the review on Goodreads.)