Jake Kerridge

When Albert Speer published Inside the Third Reich (1970), the self-exculpatory memoir he wrote in Spandau, the Germans swallowed his claims to regret the Holocaust and he became something akin to a cuddly national treasure. As a character in Leslie Croxford’s new novel puts it: “in creating the possibility of an honest, ‘good’ Nazi”, Speer managed to “implicitly elevate millions of his wartime countrymen”.

The question of how far Speer really repented obsesses this novel’s main character, an English historian called Frank Ward. On holiday in Spain, he learns that a man thought to have been Speer’s chauffeur, recuperating nearby after years as a prisoner in the USSR, has mysteriously disappeared, so Frank plays amateur detective in pursuit of this last surviving witness to Speer’s life and thoughts. His preoccupation with the truth about Speer is not entirely disinterested. He is full of regrets about the course of his own career and his lifelong retreat from intimacy after an illfated affair. When he considers Speer’s recantation – “Can one revert to the point before the past has taken over? […] Can one reconnect with the moment before time spoils and sours, allowing a new start, a second chance?” – he is assessing his own chances of starting over, too. Like Karl Ove Knausgård’s epic My Struggle, this is a book about what one can learn about oneself, and humanity in general, by examining one’s own affinities with evil men.

A novel by Croxford, now 77, is a rare treat – this is only his second since Solomon’s Folly (1974), which the novelist Paul Bowles thought evoked Alexandria better than Lawrence Durrell. Croxford brings a similar feeling for place to his Spanish setting here, as well as a Proustian ability to capture the workings of memory, bringing a sensual quality to a highly cerebral book that proves to be as enigmatically haunting as it is intellectually stimulating.