The Kindly Ones — Les Bienveillantes if you read it in French, which I didn’t — is probably the most brilliant piece of trash fiction ever written. I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell’s much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it.
But it’s definitely not as great as Le Figaro thinks: ‘A monument of contemporary literature.’ Nor Le Monde: ‘A staggering triumph.’ Nor yet Anita Brookner who claimed, in The Spectator no less, that it is not only ‘diabolically (and I use the word advisedly) clever’ but also a ‘tour de force’ which ‘outclasses all other fictions [this year] and will continue to do so for some time to come.’
Note that two out of three of those rave reviews are French. There are reasons for that. The first is that the French are always going to be hot on the idea of an American who decides to write in their language rather than his own. And the second is that it’s very long. Über-pretentiously long. The story I heard is that Littell’s French editor tried to get him to slim it down a bit and that Littell refused. And rightly so, as another editor at the same publisher cynically told a friend of mine: ‘If it had been half the length, it would never have sold anywhere near as many as 800,000 copies in France.’
But just because it’s 984 pages doesn’t make it the ‘new War and Peace’ (as Le Nouvel Observateur has it). Being concerned with the wartime adventures of just one SS officer, it hasn’t nearly Tolstoy’s range or breadth. There are places — the ones involving the ethnologist, for example — where you do feel slightly that you’re being served up raw, indigestible gobbets of the author’s evidently diligent research. And the central premise is flawed. (Don’t read the next pars if you don’t want to know what happens.)
If, as the book invites us to believe at the beginning, brutal Nazi atrocities are something any of us could have committed had we lived in the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong regime, then why make the narrator a matricidal homosexual serial killer who only ever found true love in an incestuous relationship with his sister and fantasises about being sodomised by eight-armed green-skinned Martians? Doesn’t make him exactly Everyman, does it?
Towards the end, Littell seems to admit this to himself when he gives up even trying to be Tolstoy (or Vasily Grossman) and comes over Thomas L. Harris meets Ian Fleming meets Lord of the Flies. There are two policemen who appear to have strayed from some sort of early Tom Stoppard comedy; there’s a bloated, flatulent rich industrialist in an armoured train flanked by hot-babe blonde SS women and stroking a cat; there’s a superfluity of dream sequences which you skip because you think ‘well if it’s not actually happening why should I care? It’s not like I don’t know already the guy dreaming this stuff is weird’.
Don’t get me wrong, though. The book is still a magnificent achievement, whose qualities vastly outweigh its flaws. The Stalingrad scenes are hallucinogenically intense; as too are Littell’s great set-piece descriptions of the early Einsatzgruppe atrocities like the Babi Yar massacre. You’ve probably never tried putting yourself in the shoes of a young SD officer who, whether he likes it or not, has the job of supervising the extermination and burial of village after village of (all too human-looking) men, women and children. Littell does the job for you with a verisimilitude — at once nauseating, heartbreaking and intensely disturbing — which will haunt your nightmares for months.
(to read more, click here)
Related posts:
- Frogs, scorpions, greens, lies…
- Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they ARE Eco Nazis
- Only a nutter like Gordon Brown would think it’s a good idea to scrap Trident
- Nazis: the gift that goes on giving
Finally dont get too excited about climate-gate (sooooo original) as the only people who are giving this any airtime are the sociopathic sceptic groups. your are preaching to the converted mate. Thank goodness people like you are not running the place because the future would look pretty dim otherwise.
wake up mate.
PS. I did like your story on the Lego company though.
Sorry, my liberal friends in Europe, I still love ya’: but this junk is all about wealth redistribution from my perspective and it’s a fraud. (anyone still want to buy me a guiness..? *crickets*).
I was arguing on blogs years ago, against the standard AGW argument that great scientists who are “deniers”, like Ian Plimer, are a fringe minority. That is all just part of the sheer scale of this problem, which is the leftwing media defining the argument.
Anyone who looked into this for themselves right from the start, knew that it is the IPCC/Hadley Centre/GISS cabal who are the minority. Their advantage always has been, the government funding and the media on their side. Al Gore and his circle of friends, especially in the media, are the epicentre of this.
Senator James Inhofe spent years putting up on his website, arguments from HUNDREDS of highly credentialled and distinguished scientists. Then there is the OISM petition that reached 31,000 signatures.
The IPCC Reports represented “2,500 scientists”????? What happened was they circulated the drafts among 2,500 scientists, only 308 of whom actually reviewed the Climate Science chapter anyway; and ignored any protests that were raised by any of them. As one of them said way back in 1996, “I have never witnessed such a disturbing corruption of the scientific peer review process”.
People who were at all aware of either of the medieval warm period, or of air and water thermodynamics; smelled a huge rat right from the start. The entire AGW thesis is so absurd as to require the knowing creation of falsehoods by a clique of political agents who happen to possess credentials they can abuse to that end, who were appointed to crucial positions of authorship early on, by Al Gore, James Hansen, Maurice Strong, and Bert Bolin. All paragons of virtue and impartiality, yeah right.
The crucial positions of Lead Authors of climate science chapters of the IPCC Report, actually number only 36 people. Some of these people happen to have been mere STUDENTS of Professors who are in the Michael Mann cabal, so carefully the selections needed to take place to exclude possible spoilers.
The “reviewers” however, were appointed by governments all around the world, on the basis of credentials and distinction at the time, in the early 1990’s. This is why we have ended up with governments severely embarrassed by the reviewers they appointed themselves, speaking out or attempting to speak out. Again, the media are deeply culpable for having denied these people any public say. This goes for NZ’s Reviewers, who include Vincent Gray and others, who are never referred to as IPCC Reviewers by the media; only as fringe deniers, if they are referred to at all. Imagine for yourself how these decent and honourable people have been feeling – they must feel like walking around the streets screaming.
Without media enabling, this whole thing would NEVER have gone anywhere. I don’t know what it will take to break these bastards playing God with what the public is allowed to know or not.
It is well past time for decent people to stop mincing words and fannying around being polite about the civilisational treason that is being committed against all of us.
If you want references, here is what I was saying long ago, was a required reading list. Many of these scientists and authors are now saying “at last, it took Climategate for people to wake up to what was actually clear to us all along”.
John McLean: “Peer Review? What Peer Review?”
US Senate Minority Report: “More than 650 International Scientists Dissent over man-made global warming claims”
Edward J. Wegman et al: “Ad Hoc Committee Report (To the US Senate Committee on Energy and Commerce and the US Senate Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations) on the Hockey Stick Global Climate Reconstruction” (THIS IS SHOCKING READING)
Vincent Gray: “Spinning the Climate”
S. Fred Singer et al: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”
Jack Welch: “NIWA Scientists have become propagandists”
Brian Sussman: “James Hansen: Abusing the Public Trust”
Tim Ball: GLOBAL WARMING SERIES (Excellent – best of their type yet)
Part 1: Environmental Extremism
Part 2: Historical and philosophical context of the climate change debate.
Part 3: How the world was misled about global warming and now climate change
Part 4: How UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming
Part 5: Wreaking Havoc on Global Economies
Part 6: The Hockey Stick scam that heightened global warming hysteria
Part 7: The Unholy Alliance that manufactured Global Warming
Part 8: UN’s IPCC preying on people’s ignorance
Part 9: Carbon Taxes: Hand over your money! “We are saving you from yourself”
Part 10: Environmentalists Seize Green Moral High Ground Ignoring Science
Part 11: Maurice Strong Politics 101
And believe me, there is lots, lots more. I’ve restricted the above to the bare minimum people need to get a handle on the problem. One problem is that so much of this counter argument is disconnected and fragmentary; there is probably no one book or essay that covers all the angles.
One thing James Delingpole actually does not seem to have caught up on yet, is the Google hits manipulation scandal. He says 31 million hits. But it was nearly that high 3 weeks ago, only to mysteriously drop to below 20 million, while Yahoo has gone up to over 50 million. “Bing” apparently went to 50 million 2 weeks ago, only to even more mysteriously drop back to below 10 million.
I won’t post links in case this blog doesn’t like them. Check out the online articles “Googlegate” by Harold Ambler and “Google Carrying Out More Purges Than Stalin” by Kathy Shaidle.
Keep up the service to humanity, James.
I won’t post links in case this blog doesn’t like them. Check out the online articles “Googlegate” by Harold Ambler and “Google Carrying Out More Purges Than Stalin” by Kathy Shaidle.
(And sorry, moderator please note, I think I entered my email address wrong the first time)