There’s no shortage of authors who write popular historical-fiction novels. What makes Robert Harris distinctive among them is the solid research that goes into his novels, and the accurate, detailed descriptions that leave the reader more knowledgeable than before. Some authors fall into the trap of showing off their own background research and erudition, leading to endlessly tedious discourses on this and that, but in the Harris books, the information adds to the enjoyment without sidetracking the plot, nicely blending fact and fiction.
Pompeii is perhaps my favourite of his novels: we all know what happened there, and that eruption of Vesuvius is central to the novel, but what stays in my memory is Harris’ details about the Roman aqueducts, especially the Aqua Augusta that carried water past Vesuvius to Naples. His Cicero trilogy follows the Roman orator’s complicated, fascinating political life. Enigma is set twenty centuries later, in WWII England, amid the desperate program to decipher the German signal codes. In Fatherland, Harris speculates: what if Germany had won WWII?
Harris’ latest novel V2 returns to WWII England and Germany, and has two parallel stories, one in each country. Kay Caton-Walsh works in England’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), and has just stepped out of the bed of a senior officer with whom she is having an affair when a German V2 rocket strikes nearby.
An object moving at supersonic speed compresses the atmosphere. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second before the tip of the nose cone touched the roof of the Victorian mansion block, and before the four-ton projectile crashed through all five floors, Kay registered — beyond thought, and far beyond any capacity to articulate it — some change in the air pressure, some presentiment of threat. The the two metal contacts of the missile’s fuse, protected by a silica cap, were smashed together by the force of the impact, completing an electrical circuit that detonated a ton of amatol high explosive. The bedroom seemed to evaporate into darkness.
Meanwhile, over in German-occupied The Hague, Rudi Graf is an engineer on the V2 rockets.
Moments later, a transporter roared past carrying a V2 in its hydraulic cradle — the fins first, closest to the cab, then the long body and finally, protruding over the end of the trailer, the nose cone with its one-ton warhead. Camouflaged tankers followed close behind. Graf cupped his hands and shouted in Biwack’s ear as each one passed. “That’s the methyl alcohol…the liquid oxygen..the hydrogen peroxide .. It all comes on the same trains as the missles. We fuel at the launch site.”
The V2 is the world’s first long-range guided missile. The Germans are able to launch them from German-occupied Holland to targets in London, and they travel at supersonic speed. Unlike previous rockets, they do not have radar on board, so that jamming radar signals would be a pointless defense. Instead, the V2s launch directly upwards, and have internal gyroscopes to precisely redirect their ballistic path to the target.
Therein lies the best hope of the Allied forces. If they have data from the missile’s trajectory as well as the precise point of impact, is it possible to back-calculate the launch location? And then send bombers to close it down? A team of young WAAFs with mathematical abilities is sent over to Belgium, as close to the launch as possible, and Kay is among them.
This is 1944, and here is their equipment:
When a missile is launched, an alert bell rings. The ‘girls’ wait, tensely, until a call arrives from the radar operators in England with the latitude and longitude of impact. They spring into action with their slide rules, with six minutes to complete their calculations and get them checked by their partners. Six minutes, it is hoped, will allow the British bombers to be over the targets before the Germans disassemble and move their launch equipment.
Although Kay and Graf are the primary protagonists, the character hovering over the novel is Wehrner von Braun. A real-life engineer who was indeed a co-inventor of the V2, he was also controversial, having been a member of the Nazi party and joining the Waffen SS before moving to America at the end of the war as part of the US Operation Paperclip. In America, he worked on a missile program and then the successful American lunar program.
In the novel, von Braun is an ambitious player, always one to figure out the angles and do what he needs to stay on top, be it joining the Nazi party or wearing an SS uniform. His allegiance is, always, to himself. Graf is the scientist, drawn helplessly from his own interest in space rockets into Germany’s military-industrial complex, watching his girlfriend die in a British bombing raid, unable to act when he sees the fate of the labourers building the rocket.
He had not voiced any objections to receiving SS help. Nevertheless, it had been a shock to him the following May when a camp of barrack huts had suddenly sprung up in the woods, encircled by an electrified barbed-wire fence; and an even bigger one a few days later to see a column of five hundred prisoners in their heavy striped pyjamas and caps being marched along the road by SS guards with machine guns. […] But by the end of the afternoon, God forgive him, such was his obsession with fixing the faults in the rocket’s design, he barely noticed the slaves, just as he barely registered the number of black uniforms that started to spread like spoors.
Where Harris falls short is, generally, the love lives of his characters, and V2 is no exception. Enigma was riveting at first, then got derailed by a silly plot involving an unfortunate love affair. Pompeii had some unnecessary revenge-sex between a newly-powerful slave and his former mistress. V2‘s initial affair between Kay and the Air Commodore works well, being largely off-scene, but the later sexual interactions complicated by the suspicion that everyone is a spy are less convincing.
At the end of the novel, Harris cites 30 or 40 sources for details about the V2 (including its own instruction manual), the WAAFs, how the Spitfires fared against the V2, the slave labourers who built the rockets, and the historical context, written by both German and Allied writers. Any reader doubtful about a scene in V2 can go off and do their own research. This gives one a great deal of confidence in the historical accuracy of the novel, and of course, WWII is very familiar territory for Harris.
Did the WAAF women mathematicians succeed? What happened to Graf? Readers may find the climax a little underwhelming, but I saw it as honest and realistic. You’ll need to read the book to decide for yourself.
so nice to see your review of a Robert Harris novel. Loved the review and images. Agree it is great to read authors who can translate science/facts into prose fiction so smoothly.