Review: TWO BROTHERS, Ben Elton

• first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Bantam Press
  
• ISBN 978-0-593-06205-0
• 522 pages
• source: my local library

Synopsis (Random House)

Berlin 1920

Two babies are born.
Two brothers. United and indivisible, sharing everything. Twins in all but blood.

As Germany marches into its Nazi Armageddon, the ties of family, friendship and love are tested to the very limits of endurance. And the brothers are faced with an unimaginable choice....Which one of them will survive?

Ben Elton's most personal novel to date,Two Brothers transports the reader to the time of history's darkest hour.

Read a free chapter

My take

TWO BROTHERS is on the edge of crime fiction, but there is plenty of mystery. In 1956 Russian born British citizen John Stone, living and working in London in the Foreign Office as a translator, receives a letter from East Germany from his sister in law, whom he has thought of as dead for the past decade. MI5 is also interested in why he has received this letter. Do the Stasi in East Germany want to set him up as a spy, and who is the woman who has contacted him?

The setting gives Elton the opportunity to explore the past, to go back to the rise of Hitler, and the establishment of anti-Semitism as German government policy. So in a sense this is a historical novel, which gives a glimpse of what it was like to be a Jew in Berlin from the 1930s onwards.

Elton based this novel on the stories of his two uncles who fought on opposing sides in World War II.

This is a longer novel, but well worth the investment of time.

My rating: 4.7

I've also reviewed THE FIRST CASUALTY set in World War I

Crime Fiction Alphabet: THE FIRST CASUALTY, Ben Elton

Another novel that I read and reviewed 3 years ago, and until now, the review has been published on another site. This review is also being used for participation in for the Crime Fiction Alphabet Community Meme - letter E

Random House Australia, Black Swan Books, 2006

The setting is 1917 and the Great War grinds on, with the youth of the British Empire and Germany being sacrificed on the Somme. Despite the disillusionment creeping in, both on the war front and at home, those who do not volunteer are still regarded as cowards. Douglas Kingsley, an inspector in His Majesty's Metropolitan Police in London, finds himself in gaol when he declares that the war offends his sense of logic. Rejected by his wife and condemned as a conscientious objector, Kingsley is secretly sent to Flanders to investigate the murder of a British officer at Ypres. Not only a war hero, young Viscount Alan Abercrombie was also renowned as a poet. His father, Lord Abercrombie, is the Opposition Chief Whip in the British Parliament and he wants his son's murderer hunted down and shot.

The setting of the Great War allows Elton to ask questions about the importance of investigating the murder of one man when so much bloodshed is occurring all the time. The horrific stage that this war had reached in the trenches and mud of the Somme allows the reader to view the issue of crime in war, as distinct from war crimes, from many angles. Elton's descriptions are detailed, rich, authentic, and informative and yet through all is woven the thread of who killed Abercrombie and why. Kingsley's pursuit of the truth, his need to question witnesses about to die themselves in the next assault, and his personal need to conduct a thorough investigation, bring into this re-creation of history those elements that we who read murder mysteries enjoy. At the same time we feel we can trust Elton's depiction of history. For Kingsley the quest is of the utmost importance for he undergoes a sort of 'baptism of fire' and emerges himself a war hero, but also a murderer. Alan Abercrombie was far from the first casualty in the Great War, so, even in the title of the book, Elton has created a little puzzle for us to ponder.

My rating: 4.6

Many of us have already met author Ben Elton through his television work as the writer of shows such as The Thin Blue Line and Blackadder. What is amazing about Elton is the variety in his work, from comedy to musicals to serious fiction. THE FIRST CASUALTY is his 12th novel. His first was STARK (1989) and in 1996 he won a Dagger Award for POPCORN. Already his next novel CHART THROB (2006) is available. For other titles by Ben Elton check Fantastic Fiction.

Other Reviews:

• The Telegraph review by Melissa Katsoulis
• The Independent review by Jane Jakeman
• The Telegraph review by Toby Clements
• London Times review by Chris Power

July 2006 review, first published on Murder and Mayhem

Hahndorf Band Festival, German crime fiction writers

Sitting in the Hahndorf Institute this afternoon listening to brass bands got me thinking about German crime fiction.

Hahndorf is a tourist town in the Adelaide Hills with a proud history and long connection to brass banding. Today 5 bands, including Enfield Brass (alias Klemzig Oompah) with which I am connected, participated in the 2008 Hahndorf Band Festival beginning with a street march, and then a concert this afternoon.

Thinking of German crime fiction leads me to remind you that the Carnival of Criminal Minds is at present being hosted by Internationale Krimis. The Carnival of Criminal Minds reminds me a little of Enid Blyton's MAGIC FARAWAY TREE. Every time you visited the top of the tree there was a different land hovering.

I must confess that I am not familiar with a great range of German crime fiction. When I was in Germany a little under 2 years ago, I did notice many crime fiction novels originally printed in English available as German translations, so I know crime fiction is very popular there.

However in the list that follows I'm taking a few liberties and including crime fiction titles I've read that have German settings. I included some when I wrote about the Schutzenfest back in january.

These all have a rating of better than 4.0 from me

INSPECTOR ANDERS and THE SHIP OF FOOLS, Marshall Browne
Somebody doesn't want two big European companies to conduct a merger. An estimated 21,000 redundancies will occur if the merger goes ahead. So someone plants a bomb in the boardroom of ChemtexAG, a "fish tank" with walls of unbreakable glass, on the 33rd floor of a Frankfurt office tower. For the 16 directors of the two companies meeting in the room at the time, it is instant death, their remains coating the inside walls of the room just like paint. Interpol, in the person of one-legged Inspector Anders and his off-sider Matucci, are called in. A group called Judgement Day claim responsibility, and seems to have some sort of link with the German terrorism of the 1970s. A message from the terrorists identifies another proposed merger as the next target and suddenly Anders has a race against time on his hands. Not so much a mystery as a thriller, #2 in Marshall Browne's Inspector Anders series. The action moves between Brussels, Strasbourg, and Paris.

THE FIRST CASUALTY, Ben Elton
The setting is 1917 and the Great War grinds on, with the youth of the British Empire and Germany being sacrificed on the Somme. Douglas Kingsley, an inspector in His Majesty's Metropolitan Police in London, finds himself in gaol when he declares that the war offends his sense of logic. Rejected by his wife and condemned as a conscientious objector, Kingsley is sent to Flanders to investigate the murder of a British officer, also renowned as a poet. The setting in the war allows the author to ask questions about the importance of investigating the murder of one man when so much bloodshed is occurring all the time.

THE MASK OF ATREUS, A. J. Hartley
There are really two beginning points for this thriller/mystery. In the dying days of World War Two, a German tank convoy escorting a truck is intercepted by an American platoon. In the skirmish that follows most of the Germans are killed and the rest flee leaving the truck behind. Inside the truck is a single crate stencilled with the German eagle and swastika. The contents of this crate are pivotal to the rest of the story. The story then leaps to the present day. At 3 am Deborah Miller, curator of a small private museum in Atlanta, Georgia, is awoken by her third strange phone call for the night. This one sends her hurrying back to the museum which she had left only just after midnight after a successful promotional evening. At the museum, in a room she did not even know existed, she finds the body of Richard Dixon, her mentor and the museum's founder and director. On the shelves around the room is a treasure trove of what seem to be genuine Mycenaean antiquities. The reader unravels the mystery, essentially the story of why Richard was killed, in THE MASK OF ATREUS through Deborah's eyes, travelling to Greece and Russia, patching together an incredible story.

STRAIGHT INTO DARKNESS, Faye Kellerman
Axel Berg is an Inspektor in Munich's newly formed Mordkommission. The year is 1929 and the Austrian Adolf Hitler is on the rise. He leads those who want to rid Germany of degenerates, Jews, Communists. The police force that Berg belongs to is underpaid and corrupt and ill equipped to deal with the growing Brown Shirt menace, young drunken hooligans who are manipulated by Hitler and murder and attack 'degenerates'. Lustmord — the joy of murder. The terrifying concept seems apt for the brutal slaying of a beautiful young society wife dumped in the vast English Garden. Homicide inspector Axel Berg is horrified by the crime...and disturbed by the artful arrangement of the victim's clothes and hair — a madman's portrait of death. Berg's superiors demand quick answers and a quick arrest: a vagrant, the woman's husband, anyone who can be demonized will do. When a second body is discovered, the city erupts into panic, the unrest fomented by the wild-eyed, hate-mongering Austrian Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirt party of young thugs. Berg can trust no one as he relentlessly hunts a ruthless killer, dodging faceless enemies and back-alley intrigue, struggling to bring a fiend to justice before the country — and his life — veer straight into darkness.

BROTHER GRIMM, Craig Russell
A girl's body has turned up on a Hamburg beach with a note concealed in her hand. The note gives her name, that of a 13 year old who went missing on her way home from school 3 years earlier. But it is not the same girl. Fabel has worked this out even before her parents come to identify the body and confirm his suspicions. Then two more bodies turn up, posed at a picnic table in the woods, also with notes concealed in their hands. The notes say Hansel and Gretel, in the same tiny, obsessively neat writing. This book was interesting because it was released simultaneously in English and German. Craig Russell is an author I've meant to follow up on.

THUMBPRINT, Friedrich Glauser,
Sergeant Studer has been asked to arrest Erwin Schlumpf on suspicion of having murdered his fiance’s father. The body of Wendelin Witschi, merchant and travelling salesman from Gerzenstein, has been found in the forest, shot in the head behind the ear. For reasons really unknown to himself, having delivered the prisoner to Thun Castle only an hour so previously, Studer returns to find the young man hanging by the neck from a leather belt tied around the window bars. He is in time to save Schlumpf’s life. The case of murder appears to be an open and shut one, but to Studer, an aging sergeant and unlikely detective, things don’t seem right, and of course they are not. Studer gets himself assigned to the case by almost blackmailing the magistrate who originally thought the facts clearly showed Schlumpf’s guilt. This is a very satisfying whodunit, with lots of the elements of the more modern whydunnits. I've included this one because it was translated from German. I reviewed it recently.

Anzac Day

Friday is Anzac Day, 25 April, a very important day in Australian history, and an important day in our annual calendar. It is a public holiday here, and we have dawn services, marches through city streets, and meetings of old comrades.

25 April 1915 is the day regarded Australia's "baptism of fire", the first day Australian troops went into battle on behalf of their country. It commemorates the landing of ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand troops) at dawn at Gallipoli, at the place now known as Anzac Cove. It also commemorates a defeat.

It has become a day when nationally we remember those who have participated in wars on our behalf, who gave their lives to protect and promote democracy. Increasingly both young and old Australians pilgrimage to Anzac Cove to see the dawn rise there.

Check out the Australian War Museum site.

I thought I'd point you to some books, plays, and films to look out for.

Books in my database:

THE FIRST CASUALTY by Ben Elton. My rating 4.6
The setting is 1917 and the Great War grinds on, with the youth of the British Empire and Germany being sacrificed on the Somme. Douglas Kingsley, an inspector in His Majesty's Metropolitan Police in London, finds himself in gaol when he declares that the war offends his sense of logic. Rejected by his wife and condemned as a conscientious objector, Kingsley is sent to Flanders to investigate the murder of a British officer, also renowned as a poet. The setting in the war allows the author to ask questions about the importance of investigating the murder of one man when so much bloodshed is occurring all the time.

MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE by Kerry Greenwood. My rating 4.6
A Phryne Fisher Mystery read by Julia Davis. At the end of World War 1 in Paris, Bert, Cec and 5 other Australian soldiers witness a murder when a man is pushed under a Paris train. Now, in Australia in 1928, two are very recently dead and Bert and Cec believe they are being targetted. Phryne was in Paris in 1918 and remembers the train incident. It also brings back memories of the man she was infatuated with then. Now she learns that he has recently arrived in Melbourne.

THE SHIFTING FOG (aka THE HOUSE AT RIVERTON) by Kate Morton. My rating 4.7
Set mainly during World War I and immediately after it. Six months before the war starts young Grace Bradley, 14, takes up a position as a housemaid at Riverton Manor. Eighty four years on, she is contacted by a young female filmmaker who is making a romance film about the death of Robbie Harrison, a young poet, who suicided at the house during a mid summer's eve party in 1924. Many will argue this is not a murder mystery, but you'll have to decide for yourself.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER by Jacqueline Winspear. My rating 4.6
This novel is set some time after the first in the Maisie Dobbs series. Maisie is now an established detective with rooms of her own and an assistant. It's now the early Spring of 1930. Her friend Detective Inspector Stratton of Scotland Yard's Murder Squad is investigating a murder case in Coulsden, while Maisie has been summoned to Dulwich to find a runaway heiress. The woman is the daughter of Joseph Waite, a wealthy self-made man who has lavished her with privilege but kept her in a gilded cage. His domineering ways have driven her off before, and now she∂'s bolted again. Waite's instructions are to find his daughter and bring her home. When Maisie looks into the disappearance she finds a chilling link to Stratton's murder case, and to the terrible legacy of The Great War.

PARDONABLE LIES by Jacqueline Winspear. My rating 4.6
A deathbed plea from his wife leads Sir Cecil Lawton to seek the aid of Maisie Dobbs to confirm that his son, an aviator in the Great War, did actually die when his plane crashed in France. It was something his wife never accepted and it was a torment that drove her mad. Lawton believes his son is dead and is expecting Maisie to confirm just that. Maisie was in France during the War herself as a nurse and it is where her friend Simon was wounded and brain-damaged, so going back to France is no easy thing for Maisie. She takes on an extra mission - to find out for her friend Priscilla Evernden what happened to one of her three brothers who were also killed there. I would call this book a comfortable, rather old-fashioned read, which are the qualities that I liked in the first book in the series, and which led others to dislike the book.

Films to look out for

Gallipoli (the following courtesy of Wikipedia)

Gallipoli is a 1981 Australian film, directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee, about several young men from rural Western Australia who enlist in the Australian Army during the First World War. They are sent to Turkey, where they take part in the Battle of Gallipoli. During the course of the movie, the young men slowly lose their innocence about the purpose of war. The climax of the movie occurs on the Anzac battlefield at Gallipoli and depicts the brutal attack at the Nek. Gallipoli provides a faithful portrayal of life in Australia in the 1910s — reminiscent of Weir's 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock set in 1900 — and captures the ideals and character of the Australians who joined up to fight, and the conditions they endured on the battlefield. It does, however, modify events for dramatic purposes.

The screenplay is by David Williamson and original music was provided by Australian composer Brian May (who had also scored Mad Max).

1915 (film)- available now on DVD

A classic Australian World War I saga, 1915 captures the hopes and heartaches of innocent country boys as they embark on the greatest and worst adventure of their lives, when they face the filthy deprivations and shocking savagery of trench warfare.

Best mates Billy and Walter have forged their friendship fighting over girls, racing each other on horseback and dreaming of excitement - but their biggest challenge awaits them in a war unfolding on the other side of a changing world. Caught up in the glamour of soldiering and the naïve enthusiasm to defend God, King and Country, the young men enlist in the army to prove themselves glorious heroes in the "war to end all wars." Instead, the grotesque, bloody horror will scar them for the rest of their lives, haunting them to ponder, "What did we achieve?"

Starring: Scott McGregor, Scott Burgess, Sigrid Thornton, Bill Hunter, Lorraine Bayly, Arna Maria Winchester, Serge Lazareff, Richard Moir, Ilona Rodgers, Martin Vaughan, Gerard Kennedy, Diana Benedetto, Graham Rouse, Adrian Wright.

Play to read

THE ONE DAY OF THE YEAR by Alan Seymour (1958)
A controversial look at how Anzac Day is remembered in Australia. Central to Alan Seymour's modern Australian classic is the paradoxical nature of Anzac Day. We chose as our venerated, inescapable symbol of military remembrance a campaign that was both a tactical fiasco and a defeat. There is an article in Sydney Morning Herald worth reading. Find a copy of the play if you can. It was banned from the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960.