Kanon’s latest engaging, but uneven
The Accomplice Joseph Kanon
Atria
Most of Joseph Kanon’s thrillers are set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Though the time frame of The Accomplice, his ninth novel, is a bit farther along — set over the course of several weeks in 1962 — the horrors of the Nazi conquest are all too fresh here. The book centres on two kinds of the war survivors: Jewish death camp inmates and their families; and the camp overseers and deranged medical “researchers” who escaped to South America after the collapse of the Third Reich. Kanon’s engaging but uneven novel imagines what might happen if members of these two groups collided.
The plot takes flight when Aaron Wiley, a CIA analyst — family name originally Weiss — travels from Washington to Hamburg to visit Uncle Max, a renowned Nazi hunter who competes with Simon Wiesenthal in tracking down the war criminals responsible for the Holocaust. While uncle and nephew are strolling by the Hamburg waterfront, Weiss is convinced he has spotted Otto Schramm, a Josef Mengele-style ogre who spared him but murdered his young son at Auschwitz. Schramm had been declared dead in a South American car crash years earlier, but an excited Weiss persuades Wiley that the monster is alive and Wiley must bring him to justice. Schramm, alive indeed and briefly (and implausibly) in Germany for the funeral of the mentally ill wife he abandoned after the war, is soon back in Argentina. Taking a leave from the CIA — which is preoccupied with the Soviets and interested in Nazis only insofar as it might recruit them in the anti-communist cause — Wiley follows Schramm to Buenos Aires. An obvious route to Schramm, who has gone into hiding, is Otto’s daughter Hanna, a high-society divorcee. Guess how long it takes for Hanna and Wiley to end up in bed together?
It’s a well-worn pop-novel trope — he’s using her to pry info out of her, she’s using the affair to find out who the secretive Wiley really is and how dangerous he might be.
The sexy Aaron-hanna cat-and-mouse game is the best thing in the novel. Also convincing are the ongoing geopolitical games. A Mossad agent assists Wiley up to a point, but the Israeli abduction of Adolf Eichmann a few years earlier was a scandal in Latin America and now the Mossad is skittish.
Unfortunately, the novel grows wobbly in the last quarter or so, with cheesy car chases and clumsy fisticuffs and gunfights that were uninteresting when they were staged in Monogram Pictures B-westerns in 1946. These scenes are unworthy of the moral and historical matters with which Kanon is grappling.
The Washington Post