Harris blasts back to form
ALL Robert Harris’s best work sees him fully engaged and obsessive about the smallest details of authenticity, whether it’s in 1992’s Fatherland, in which Hitler won World War II, 1995’s Enigma, a rich imagining of the people who broke the Germans’ codes in the war, or the magnificent Cicero trilogy about the Roman orator. His lesser works, such as The Fear Index (a slapdash will-this-do response to the 2008 financial crisis) and his most recent novel, The Second Sleep, a badtempered grumble about the irritations of modern life, see him struggling to work up any enthusiasm, and end up as insignificant contractual obligations.
V2, fortunately, falls into the first category. In fact, Harris is so excited about the German rocket technology that started as the lethal lashing out of an almost-defeated Hitler and culminated in putting men on the moon, that, initially, he strays too far into geek territory. But he manages to rein himself in enough to tell this lively tale, loosely
By Robert Harris (Hutchinson) ★★★★✩
based on the last months of the war when the Nazis hurled these vast, but only half-finished, rockets, packed with explosives and fuel, over the North Sea and into London. Harris (left) focuses on German rocket scientist Dr Graf, who is consumed by his work but horrified at its appropriation by the Nazis, and Kay, a British WAAF keen to help find out where these towers of death are being fired from. Harris’s characters, as usual, skim across the surface of the thrilling story, like pebbles on a lake, but the pace is certainly brisk enough to compensate for any lack of depth.