With my novels,
Harris explores overlooked terror in London during Second World War
I take something from history that interests me, and then I think about the characters. So here it becomes a kind of duel between two people who never meet — at least until the very end. Robert Harris on his new book
From September to March, ballistic missiles were being fired against London. It was a hinge in the history of the modern world — it was when the rocket age started to arrive. Robert Harris
V2 Robert Harris Random House Canada
The Woolworth department store had just received a shipment of saucepans — a scarce item in a Britain now in its fifth year of war. So a long line of housewives had formed outside the four-storey building, waiting to gain entrance. That was when the rocket struck.
Nazi Germany was again hitting London with its terrifying new weapon.
“The V2 hit Woolworths dead centre and plowed through every floor before detonating to form a crater 30 feet deep,” writes novelist Robert Harris in his new thriller, V2. “Most of the victims died instantly, either in the Woolworths itself, or in the Co-operative store next door, or in the draper's across the street, or on the number 53 bus, where the corpses remained upright in their seats, their internal organs traumatized by the blast wave. One hundred and sixty people were killed.”
Harris's latest novel, published in Canada by Random House, is a work of fiction, but when it comes to the details of the carnage inflicted on Londoners in November of 1944, it rests on a foundation of documentary authenticity.
Harris, 63, likes working from a basis of fact. For example, his earlier bestseller, Enigma, about the cracking of an enemy code, integrated real-life events into the narrative.
“In the case of this new novel, these were the actual missiles fired on London during the last week of November,” he says by phone from his home in rural England.
“I wanted to convey what it was like for people on the ground and even use the names of real-life casualties. I needed to make the point that it really did happen. Missiles plunged out of the sky at twice the speed of sound and landed on civilian areas.”
Harris finds the horror of Germany's V2 rockets to be oddly marginalized in history, too often overshadowed by more legendary wartime events like the Blitz and the Battle of Britain.
“But it was really an extraordinary chapter. From September to March, ballistic missiles were being fired against London. It was a hinge in the history of the modern world — it was when the rocket age started to arrive. Because it's been unexplored was one reason I wanted to write the book.”
German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, that amoral genius who would blithely switch his loyalty to the U.S. space program after the war, had proudly provided Adolf Hitler with the V2 ballistic missile, capable of travelling at three times the speed of sound and wreaking havoc at a time when German might was otherwise disintegrating. Which is why Hitler frantically ordered 10,000 to quickly be built.
Yet, for all the destruction it was causing, the V2 was scarcely foolproof.
“The rockets were an extraordinarily sophisticated technology, probably the most advanced technology on the planet in 1944, and at the same time very crude,” Harris says. “It was perfect for getting out of the Earth's orbit and getting into space, but it was imprecise. You might aim it at Charing Cross, which is at the geographical heart of London, and if it hit anything within five miles of that, it was considered a great success.”
The novel focuses on five critical days in a perilous high-stakes game to confront and ultimately checkmate a devastating cross-channel threat. In telling his story, Harris lifts the lid off a once hush-hush
Allied operation in newly liberated Belgium. It's there, in the town of Mechelen, that a mathematically inclined WAAF officer named Kay Caton-walsh becomes an important player in a mission to locate and destroy the missile sites in still-occupied Holland.
Her unseen opponent is Rudi Graf, a conflicted German scientist dispatched to Holland to oversee the firing of a lethal but dangerously volatile weapon at London.
“With my novels, I take something from history that interests me, and then I think about the characters,” Harris says. “So here it becomes a kind of duel between two people who never meet — at least until the very end.”
A major incentive for the novel was a 2016 Times of London obituary of 95-year-old Eileen Younghusband. Intrigued by a reference to her wartime work in Mechelen, Harris then discovered she had published two volumes of memoir. He says now he would never have written V2 had not Younghusband disclosed details of that top-secret operation many decades later.
“It's a curious thing,” he says. “You don't find it in any official histories of the war against the rockets or in histories of British intelligence. Yet it clearly did take place. So there is a certain mystery surrounding it, and of course from a novelist's point of view, that makes things all the more interesting.”
Out of these discoveries he fashioned the fictional character of Kay Caton-walsh.
“She's one of a small group of women from the air force who arrive in Belgium with their slide rules and are told that if they could calculate a parabolic curve within six minutes, they could stop the next rocket attack on London. I thought that was a wonderful unexplored story.”
When COVID-19 sent Britain into lockdown in March, Harris experienced a “wartime feeling” of being upended.
“I'd written about a quarter of V2, and the effect of the pandemic was paralyzing at first. I found it very hard to continue, and for about three weeks stopped altogether. I thought it pointless to be writing in the midst of all this, but then my feelings changed — I would try to come out of this period with a book at the end of it. So I went back to my desk and stuck at it until I'd finished. But it was an odd experience.”
Despite the disruption of a pandemic, the novel reached publication with astonishing speed — arriving in Britain in September, when it became an immediate bestseller, and in North America now.
“Its publication has been something of a remote experience,” Harris says with a laugh. All the necessary aspects — editing, design, marketing — had to be done online. “Nobody got together in the office. The whole thing was done by people working at home.”
Harris sees one positive aspect of the pandemic — more people are reading. “So in a funny way, this whole experience has been a vindication of books.”