Deviation Posting – Wartime Thrillers

Over the holidays a few World War Two located novels, new and not so new, fell into my hands courtesy of the second hand bookshops of Taipei and Hong Kong. I enjoyed them both but then I’m a sucker for anything set during WW2 and the period continues to be a honeypot for authors.

Tim Binding’s Island Madness was published in 1999 but I only just came across it. Set in Guernsey during the War it, of course, raises the thorny issue of collaboration – the Channel Islands being the only part of the UK to be occupied by German troops. Jersey, Alderney and Sark (plus a few small ones I can’t remember the names of) were also occupied – indeed Alderney was turned into a brutal Nazi concentration camp and while Jersey and Guernsey have been talked about over the years little is ever said about Alderney.

Binding’s novel is situated around a murder on the island but raises much wider issues about what you would and wouldn’t do if the Nazis occupied your town, a subject the Brits are often a bit blase about even though we know that the Channel Islanders made some tough and not always wise choices. Binding seems to suggest that collaboration is, obviously, a question of degrees but that people can slip into it through familiarity and routine as easily as through hunger and desperation. There’s also the conundrum of the local detective – black marketeers etc may be resisting in part but may also be stealing from their own and hurting them more than the Germans. And there’s the question of whether when faced with occupation there could ever be such a thing as a ‘good German’? The actual muder plot is pretty good but it’s the wider issues that stick in the mind – the priorities people choose, the decisions they make and the fact that, for the Channel Islanders, the new regime could have been around for a thousand years. In the end of course it wasn’t.

Mark Mills chooses Malta, the fortress island of the Med, for his recently published The Information Officer. While, to be fair, the Channel Islands live on in Britain’s collective memory as a bit of an embarrassment, Malta remains one of those shining examples (at least in the popular memory) of a community standing strong against the forces of fascism – ‘Malta can Take it’ as they said – and it did. Images of Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins in the 1953 film The Malta Story stuck in my head for the sort of architecture and locations Mills is using.

Mills handles the geography of Malta well (considering most readers, including me, don’t the place at all) and the conflicts simmering between the British and the Maltese as the bombings escalated continuously. For me location and setting are always more important than plot and Mills’ plot is a bit thin but that doesn’t matter much as you get the sense of wartime Malta. Incidentally, this book is a prime example of something all too common these days in British published books particularly – it’s full of typos that should have been picked up during proofreading. I guess it’s cutbacks at the publishers but it’s rather annoying when what are obviously, though understanable, errors that crept in at an editing stage remain in the final book.