It’s not a bad read, this one, but it doesn’t feel quite as good as it wants to be. It’s a big chunky book, because it’s one of those dual timeline jobs. You know, you get one story set in the past, and another set in the present, and the two are told in alternating chapters or chunks, and they start out independent and then come together in a manner that, hopefully, illuminates and deepens the significance of both. That kind of thing.
So, back then, we have a story about an SS officer and his Portuguese pals, who start out trying to corner the market in Portuguese minerals, then end up founding a Lisbon bank with a load of Nazi gold. And around now, we have a story about a police inspector in Lisbon investigating the murder of a 14-year-old girl. They’re told in chunks of around 50 pages each. Our first hints at the connection come about halfway through the book, as certain names begin to appear in both stories, and then thinks turn out to be more closely tied together as the murder investigation comes to a head.
Is it worth it? Um, sort of? I was thinking for a fair while that the connection between the two storylines was going to turn out to be tenuous, and it’s not quite that, but essentially the Nazi one just ends up providing motive for crime and conspiracy in the present one, and I’m not sure we needed 200 pages to do that (200 pages that are fine, but not stellar). There is some slightly heavy-handed stuff about the cyclical nature of violence through generations, but I’m not sure that’s enough illumination to be worth the candle.
The other thing that bothers me about this book is all the sexual stuff, both consensual and not. Both storylines are replete with it. Now, look, it’s no doubt true that SS officers used sexual violence and sex workers frequently. But it’s still an authorial decision to highlight and describe those practices, so we can question it. And it’s no doubt true that some 14-year-old girls are promiscuous, possibly in part because the adult world around them is replete with various forms of sexual misbehaviour. But it’s still an authorial decision to make the promiscuity and misbehaviour central to the murder plot. It never quite feels gratuitous, but it does feel like a lot.