PositiveThe London Review of BooksHarris makes his version of the Third Reich in its 32nd year reasonably plausible. Hitler is a venerable figure who doesn’t appear in the story in person ... It is the plot of Fatherland, set among the rival police forces of the police state, that makes a second literary comparison unavoidable. In the course of three straightforward period detective novels, with maybe a fourth on the way, Philip Kerr has pursued the same rivalries, the same kind of scandals involving Nazi big-wigs, the same dark political conspiracies underlying what seem at first to be routine crimes ... Fatherland is a formidable thriller ... It is terse, involving and expertly-constructed ... It’s a work of the alternative present within a work of the alternative present, but still not a picture of the world we know ... Dick is juggling three versions of what happened, or might have happened, in recent history. He is saying, if I read him aright, that we should not attribute inevitability to any of them.
